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Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. 
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CHAUCER 



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NOTE. 

The peculiar conditions of this essay must be left to explain themselves. 
It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications of 
the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the Society's 
Director, Mr. Furnivall. To other recent writers on Chaucer — including 
Mr. Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation — I have referred, 
in so far as it was in my power to do so. Perhaps I may take this oppor- 
tunity of expressing a wish that Pauli's History of England, a work beyond 
the compliment of an acknowledgment, were accessible to every English 
reader. 

A. W. W. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Page. 
Chaucer's Times , , 9 



CHAPTER II, 
Chaucer's Life and Works yj 

CHAPTER III. 
Characteristics of Chaucer and of his Poetry . . . 94 

CHAPTER IV. 
Epilogue . „ 122 

CHAPTER V. 
Glossary . . . 129 



CHAUCER. 

CHAPTER I. 
Chaucer's times. 

The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of 
unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many 
and wide as are the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course 
of his outer life, and doubtful as many important passages of it re- 
main — in vexatious contrast with the certainty of other relatively 
insignificant data — we have at least become aware of the founda- 
tions on which alone a trustworthy account of it can be built. 
These foundations consist partly of a meagre though gradually in- 
creasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in public 
documents— in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the 
Exchequer, the Custom Rolls, and such-like records — partly of the 
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal 
evidence of the poet's indisputably genuine works, together with a 
few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or im- 
mediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as 
genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such 
as cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on prin- 
ciples far from infallible with regard to all the instances to which 
they have been applied, but now accepted by the large majority of 
competent scholars. Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness 
and dryness itself, except to patient endeavour stimulated by the 
enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited number of results 
have been safely established, and others have, at all events, been 
placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of con- 
clusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages ; and 
even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations 
through a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, 
or commended to sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction. 

A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and 
the significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography 
which, whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be de- 
termined before Chiucer's life can be written. They are not, " all 
and some," mere antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those 



lO CHAUCER. 

who have leisure and inclination for microscopic enquiries. So 
with the point immediately in view. It has been said with much 
force that Tyrwhitt, whose service to the study of Chaucer remain 
uneclipsed by those of any other scholar, would have composed a 
quite different biography of the poet, had he not been confounded 
by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date of Chaucer's 
birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date Tyrwhitt 
" supposed " the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the 
voucher ; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at 
the desire of Caxton) appears to have merely borne a Latin in- 
scription without any dates ; and the marble monument erected in 
its stead, "in the name of the Muses," by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, 
while giving October 25th, 1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, 
makes no mention either of the date of his birth or of the number of 
years to which he attained, and, indeed, promises no more informa- 
tion than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary, the poet Gower, 
should have referred to him in the year 1392 as " now in his days 
Did," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially as 
it is by mere conjecture that the vear of Gower's own birth is 
placed as far back as 1 320. Still less weight can be attached to 
the circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded 
himself as the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accord- 
ance with the common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) 
times, spoke of the older writer as his " father " and "father rev- 
erent." In a coloured portrait carefully painted from memory by 
Occleve on the margin of a manuscript, Chaucer is represented 
with grey hair and beard ; but this could not of itself be taken to 
contradict the supposition that he died about the age of sixty. 
And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-evi- 
dently rests on tradition only ; for Leland was born more than a 
century after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's 
own works of undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the 
subject. His poem, t\\Q House of Fame, has been variously dated ; 
but at any period of his manhood he might have said, as he says 
there, that he was " too old " to learn astronomy, and preferred to 
take his science on faith. In the curious lines called UEnnoy de 
Chaucer a Scogan, the poet, while blaming his friend for his want 
of perseverance in a love-suit, classes himself among "them that 
be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of himself and his Muse 
as out of date and rusty. But there seems no sufficient reason for 
removing the date of the composition of these lines to an earlier 
year than 1393 ; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer 
have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar 
remark might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old 
age, "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the Complaifit of Venus^ 
generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we 
reject the evidence of a further passage, in the Ctickoo and the 
Nighti7is;ale^ a poem of disputed genuineness, we accordingly 
arrive at the conclusion that there is no reaso-vi for demurring to 
the only direct external evidence in existence as to the date of 



CHAUCER. I J 

Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause of chivalry held at 
Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through part of a 
campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness ; and on 
this occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, re- 
corded as that of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had 
borne arms for twenty-seven years. A careful enquiry into the 
accuracy of the record as to the ages of the numerous other wit- 
nesses at the same trial has established it in an overwhelming 
majority of instances ; and it is absurd gratuitously to charge 
Chaucer with having understated his age from motives of vanity. 
The conclusion, therefore, seems to remain unshaken, that he 
was born about the year 1340, or some time between that year 
and 1345. 

Now, we possess a charming poem by Chaucer called the As- 
sembly of Fowls, elaborately courtly in its conception, and in its 
execution giving proofs of Itahan reading on the part of its author, 
as well as of a ripe humour such as is rarely an accompaniment of 
extreme youth. This poem has been thought by earher commenta- 
tors to allegorise an event known to have happened in 1358 ; by later 
critics another which occurred in 1364. Clearly, the assumption 
that the period from 1340 to 1345 includes the date of Chaucer's 
birth suffices of itself to stamp the one of these conjectures as un- 
tenable, and the other as improbable, and (when the style of the poem 
and treatment of its subject are taken into account) adds weight 
to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in 
question. Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in 
Chaucer's biography and the question of his works are affected by 
one another. 

Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of 
the fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the 
year of his death. In other words, it covers rather more than the 
interval between the most glorious epoch of Edward III.'s reign — 
for Crecy was fought in 1346 — and the downfall, in 1399, of his 
unfortunate successor Richard II. 

The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be 
the test of^ greatness ; but in Edward III.'s time, as in that of 
Henry V., who inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived 
so much of his glory, there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. 
It is only of a small population that the author of the Vision concern- 
in(r Piers Plowman could have gathered the representatives into 
a 'single field, or that Chaucer himself could have composed a 
family picture fairly comprehending, though not altogether exhaust- 
ing, the chief national charactei'-tjqDes. In the year of King 
Richard II.'s accession (1377), according to a trustworthy calcula- 
tion based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total number 
of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and 
a half. A quarter of a century earlier— in the days of Chaucer's 
boyhood — their numbers had been perhaps twice as large. For not 
less than four great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6), 



13 CHAUCER. 

had swept over the land, and at least one-half of its population, 
including two-thirds of the inhabitants of the capital, had been 
carried off by the ravages of the obstinate epidemic — "the foul 
death of England," as it was called in a formula of execration in 
use among the people. In this year — 1377 — London, where Chau- 
cer was doubtless born, as well as bred, where the greater part of 
his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those 
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the his- 
toric river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently num- 
bered not more than 35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the 
case, no place was more exposed than London to the inroads of 
the Black Death, neither was any other so likely elastically to re- 
cover from them. For the reign of Edward III. had witnessed a 
momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital — an advance 
reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the same 
period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had grown 
larger as its houses had grown higher ; and mediaeval London, such 
as we are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those 
leading features which it so long retained, from the days when 
Chaucer, with downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its 
street between Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in 
England, the remembrance of the most awful physical visitations 
which have ever befallen the country must have long lingered ; and, 
after all has been said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should 
be so exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his 
poems does he refer to the Plague : once in an allegorical fiction 
which is of Italian if not of French origin, and where, therefore, no 
special reference to the ravages of the disease in E 7tg I and m^yhQ 
intended when Death is said to have " a thousand slain this pesti- 
lence " — 

" . . , . He hath slain this year 
Hence over a mile, within a great village 
Both men and women, child and hind and page." 

The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs 
in the description of the Doctor of Physic^ the grave graduate in 
purple surcoat and blue white-furred hood ; nor, by the way, may 
this portrait itself be altogether without its use as throwing some 
light on the helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. 
For though in all the world there was none like this doctor to speak 
of physic and of surgery ; though he was a very perfect practitioner, 
and never at a loss for telling the cause of any malady and for 
supplying the patient with the appropriate drug, sent in by the 
doctor's old and faithful friends the apothecaries ; tiiough he was 
well versed in all the authorities from ^sculapius to the writer 
of the Rosa Anglica (who cures inflammation homoeopathically by 
the use of red draperies); though, like a truly wise physician, he 
began at home by caring anxiously for his own digestion and for 
his peace of mind (" his study was but little in the Bible ") — yet 
the basis of his scientific knowledge was " astronomy," L e., astrol- 



CHAUCER. 



13 



ogy, "the better part of medicine," as Roger Bacoti calls it ; together 
with that " natural magic " by which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells 
us, the famous among the learned have known how to make men 
whole or sick. And there was one specific which, from a double 
point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very highly, 
and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts. He was but easy 
(/. e.^ slack) of "dispence " : — 

" He kepte that he won in pestilence. 
For gold in physic is a cordial; 
Therefore he loved gold in special." 

Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched 
in heart by these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had 
first smitten the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower 
(if the Plague of 1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck 
down, among others, Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chau- 
cer's Duchess Blanche). Calamities such as these would assuredly 
have been treated as warnings sent from on high, both in earlier 
times, when a Church better braced for the due performance of its 
never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful ears the signs of the 
wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in spirit by the 
self-searching morality of Puritanism. But from the sorely-tried 
third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of Lang- 
land cries, as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, 
that " these pestilences " are the penalty of sin and of naught 
else. It. is assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the 
fullest proof, to accuse another of thoughtlessness orheartlessness ; 
and though the classes for which Chaucer mainly wrote, and with 
which he mainly felt, were in ail probability as little inclined to im- 
prove the occasions of the Black Death as the middle classes of 
the present day would be to fall on their knees after a season of 
commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the later years 
of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not un- 
frequently spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called 
forth moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a 
rhymed lamentation in Latin ; and at different dates in King 
Richard's reign, the poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and 
friend, inveighed both in Latin and in English, from his conserva- 
tive point of view, against the corruption and sinfulness of society 
at large. But by this time the great peasant insurrection had added 
its warning, to which it was impossible to remain deaf. 

A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to 
sackcloth and ashes. On the whole, it is clear that though the 
last years of Edward III. were a season of failure and disappoint- 
ment — though from the period of the First Pestilence ■^■^""^''ds ^h'- 
signs increase of the King's unpopularity ar--' 
content — yet the overburdened and enfee' 
almost as slowly as the King himself to 
tion of a conquering power. In 1363 h' 
pletion of his fiftieth year ; and three 



14 



CHAUCER. 



I 



time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success. By 
1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained 
by himself and the valiant Prince of Wales ; and during the years 
remaining to him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed 
his favourites. From bemg a conquering power the English mon- 
archy was fast sinking into an island which found it difficult to 
defend its own shores. There were times towards the close of 
Edward's, and early in his successor's reign, when matters would 
have gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous of having 
their money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage, 
and anxious, hke their type the Merchant in Chaucer, that " the 
sea were kept for anything " between Middleburgh and Harwich, 
had not some of them, such as the Londoner, John Philpot, occa- 
sionally armed and manned a squadron of ships on their own ac- 
count, in defiance of red tape and its censures. But in the days 
when Chaucer and the generation with which he grew up were 
young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in the 
land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the 
burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a 
civihsed people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time 
when the dechne in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), 
is evident from the answer given to the application from Rome for 
the arrears of thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King 
John, or rather from what must unmistakably have been the drift 
of that answer. Its terms are unknown, but the demand was 
never afterwards repeated. 

The power of England, in the period of an ascendency to -which 
she so tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon 
the valour of her arms. Our country was already a rich one in 
comparison with most others in Europe. Other purposes besides 
that of providing good cheer for a robust generation were served 
by the wealth of her great landed proprietors, and of the " worthy 
vavasours " (smaller land-owners) who, like Chaucer's Franklin — ■ 
a very Saint Julian or pattern of hospitality — knew not what it was 
to be "without baked meat in the house," where their 

" Tables dormant in the hall alway 
Stood ready covered all the longe day." 

From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders, 

came the laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which 

did, so much to consolidate national feehng in England. The 

foreign companies of merchants long contrived to retain the chief 

share of the banking business and export trade assigned to them 

by the ^^hort-sighted commercial policy of Edward III., and the 

industries of Hanseatic and Flemish immi- 

"■n almost unbearable competition in our 

t the active import trade, which already 

oth nearer and remote parts of Chris- 

'art^eJ^ in native handsi and En?-hsh 



L 



CHAUCER. 15 

chivalry, diplomacy, and literature followed in the lines of the 
trade-routes to the'Baltic and the Mediterranean. Our mariners,, 
like their type the Shipman in Chaucer (an anticipation of the 
" Venturer'" of later days, with the pirate as yet, perhaps, more 
strongly marked in him than the patriot), 

"... Knew well all the havens, as they were 
From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre, 
And every creek in Brittany and Spain." 

Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on 
th-e part of our shipmen in this period to self-help, in offence as 
well as in defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy 
was frequently employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men 
being at times seized or impressed for the purpose by order of the 
Crown. On one of these occasions the port of Dartmouth, 
whence Chaucer at a venture ("for aught I wot ") makes his Ship- 
man hail, is found contributing a larger total of ships and men 
than any other port in England. For the rest, Flanders was cer- 
tainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth and in mercantile 
and industrial activity ; as a manufacturing country she had no 
equal, and in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the Ger- 
man Hansa. Chaucer's Merchant characteristically wears a 
" Flandrish beaver hat ; " and it is no accident that the scene of 
ih^ P a? doner' s Tale^ which begins with a description of " super- 
fluity abominable," is laid in Flanders. In England, indeed, the 
towns never came to domineer as they did in the Netherlands. 
Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be ruled by the 
landed interests only, so in proportion as the EngHsh towns, and 
London especially, grew richer, their voices were listened to in the 
settlement of the affairs of the nation. It might be very well for 
Chaucer to close the description of his Merchant with what looks 
very much like a fashionable writer's half sneer : — 

r / " Forsooth, he was a worthy man withal ; 

But, truly, I wot not how men him call." 

Yet not only was high political and social rank reached by indi- 
vidual " merchant princes," such as the wealthy William de la 
Pole, a descendant of whom is said (though on unsatisfactory 
evidence) to have been Chaucer's granddaughter, but the govern- 
ment of the country came to be very perceptibly influenced by the 
class from which they sprang. On the accession of Richard II., 
two London citizens were appointed controllers of the war-sub- 
sidies granted to the Crown : and in the Parliament of 1382 a 
committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question 
of a merchants' loan to the King. The importance and self-con- 
sciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased 
with that of the great merchants. When, in 1393, King Richard 
II. marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London 
by a stately procession through " new Troy," he was welcomed, 



1 6 CHAUCER. 

according to the Friar who has commemorated the event in Latin 
verse, by the trades in an array resembling an angelic host ; and 
among the crafts enumerated we recognise several of those repre- 
sented in Chaucer's company of pilgrims — by the Carpenter, the 
Webbe (Weaver), and the Dyer, all clothed 

" . . .In one livery 

Of a solemn and great fraternity," 

The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up itshead, col« 
lectively and individually. The historical original of Chaucer's 
Host — the actual Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the 
Tabard Inn in Southwark, was likewise a member of Parliament, 
and very probably felt as sure of himself in real life as the mimic 
personage bearing his name does in its fictitious reproduction. 
And he and his fellows, the " poor and simple Commons " — for so 
humble was the style they were wont to assume in their addresses 
to the sovereign — began to look upon themselves, and to be looked 
upon, as a power in the State. The London traders and handi- 
craftsmen knew what it was to be well-to-do citizens, and if they 
had failed to understand it, home monition would have helped to 
make it clear to them: — 

" Well seemed each of them a fair burgess, 
For sitting in a guildhall on a dais. 
And each one for the wisdom that he can 
Was shapely for to be an alderman. 
They had enough of chattels and of rent, 
And very gladly would their wives assent ; 
And, truly, else they had been much to blame. 
It is full fair to be yclept maddme, 
And fair to go to vigils all before, 
And have a mantle royally y-bore." 

The English State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy — the 
ramification of contributory courts and camps — of the crude days 
of William the Conqueror and his successors. The Norman lords 
and their Enghsh dependents no longer formed two separate ele- 
ments in the body-politic. In the great French wars of Edward 
III., the English armies had no longer mainly consisted of the 
baronial levies. The nobles had indeed, as of old, ridden into bat< 
tie at the head of their vassals and retainers ; but the body of the 
force had been made up of Englishmen serving for pay, and armed 
with their national implement, the bow — such as Chaucer's Yeoman 
carried with him on the ride to Canterbury : — 

, " A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen 
Under his belt he bare fail thriftily. 
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly ; 
His arrows drooped not with feathers low, 
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow." 



CHAUCER, ly 

The use of the bow was specially favoured by both Edward III. 
and his successor; and when, early in the next century, the 
chivalrous Scottish king, James I. (of whom mention will be made 
among Chaucer's poetic disciples) returned from his long Enghsh 
captivity to his native land, he had no more eager care than that 
his subjects should learn to emulate the English in the handling 
of their favourite weapon. Chaucer seems to' be unable to picture 
any army without it, and we find him relating how, from ancient 
Troy, 

" Hector and many a worthy wight out went 
With spear in hand, and with their big bows bent." 

No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, 
and when the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed 
by its self-imposed contributions, the Scottish and French cam- 
paigns should have called forth that national enthusiasm which 
found an echo in the songs of Lawrence Minot, as hearty war- 
poetry as has been composed in any age of our literature. They 
were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual popularity 
they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they may 
have reached Chaucer's ears in his boyhood. 

Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his 
death in a dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the 
proudest hope of both dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, 
and the Black Prince had preceded his father to the tomb. The 
good ship England (so sang a contemporary poet) was left without 
rudder or helm ; and in a kingdom full of faction and discontent, 
the future of the Plantagenet throne depended on a child. While 
the young king's ambitious uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- 
caster (Chaucer's patron), was in nominal retirement, and his 
academical ally, Wyclif, was gaining popularity as the mouthpiece 
of the resistance to the papal demands, there were fermenting 
beneath the surface elements of popular agitation, which had been 
but little taken into account by the political factions of Edward 
the Third's reign, and by that part of its society with which 
Chaucer was more especially connected. But the multitude, whose 
turn, in truth, comes but rarely in the history of a nation, must 
every now and then make itself heard, although poets may seem 
all but Wind and deaf to the tempest as it rises, and bursts, and 
passes away. Many causes had concurred to excite the insurrection 
which temporarily destroyed the influence of John of Gaunt, and 
which for long cast a deep shade upon the effects of the teaching 
of Wyclif. The acquisition of a measure of rights and power by 
the middle classes had caused a general swaying upwards ; and 
throughout the peoples of Europe floated those dreams and spec- 
ulations concerning the equality and fraternity of all men, which 
needed but a stimulus and an opportunity to assume the practical 
shape of a revolution. The melancholy thought which pervades 
Langland's Vision is still that of the helplessness of the poor ; 
and the remedy to which he looks against the corruption of the 



jfS CHAUCER. 

governing classes is the advent of a superhuman king, whom ha 
identifies with the ploughman himself, the representative of suf- 
fering humility. But about the same time as that of the com- 
position of this poem — or not long afterwards — Wyclif had sent 
forth among the people his "simple priests," who illustrated by 
contrast the conflict which his teaching exposed between the ex- 
isting practice of the Church and the original documents of her 
faith. The connexion between WycHf's teaching and the peasants' 
insurrection under Richard II. is as undeniable as that between 
Luther's doctrines and the great social uprising in Germany a 
century and a half afterwards. When, upon the declaration of the 
Papal Schism, Wyclif abandoned all hope of a reform of the Church 
from wn'thin, and, defying the injunctions of foe and friend alike, 
entered upon a course of theological opposition, the popular in- 
fluence of his followers must have tended to spread a theory admit- 
ting of very easy application ad hominem — the theory, namely, 
that the tenure of all offices, whether spiritual or temporal, is 
justified only by the personal fitness of their occupants. With 
such levelling doctrine, the Socialism of popular preachers like 
John Balle might seem to coincide with sufficient closeness ; and 
since worthiness was not to be found in the holders of either 
spiritual or temporal authority, of either ecclesiastical or lay wealth, 
the time had palpably come for the poor man to enjoy his own 
again. Then, the advent of a weak government, over which a power- 
ful kinsman of the King and unconcealed adversary of the Church . 
was really seeking to recover the control, and the imposition of a tax 
coming home to all men except actual beggars, and filling serfdom's 
cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the opportunity, and the 
insurrection broke out. Its violence fell short of that of the 
French Jacqtierie a quarter of a century earlier ; but no doubt 
could exist as to its critical importance. As it happened, the revolt 
turned with special fury against the possessions of the Duke of 
Lancaster, whose sympathies with the cause of ecclesiastical re- 
form it definitively extinguished. 

After the suppression of this appaUing movement by a party of 
Order, comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period 
of reaction ensued. In the reign of Richard II., whichever fac- 
tion might be in the ascendant, and whatever direction the King's 
own sympathies may have originally taken, the last state of the 
peasantry was without doubt worse than the first. Wycliffism as 
an influence rapidly declined with the death of Wyclif himself, as 
it hardly could but decline, considering the absence from his teach- 
ing of any tangible system of Church government ; and Lollardry 
came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form 
of dissent from the existing system. Finally, Henry of Lan- 
caster, John of Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as a sort of 
saviour of society — a favourite character for usurpers to pose 
in before the applauding assemblage of those who claim "a 
stake in the country," Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, whose 
wisdom was of the kind which goes with the times, who was in turn 



CHAUCER. 



19 



a flatterer of Richard and (by the simple expedient of a revised 
second edition of his 7na^mi?n opus) a flatterer of Henry, offers 
better testimony than Chaucer to the conservatism of the upper 
classes of his age, and to the single-minded anxiety for the good 
times when 

" Justice of law is held ; 

The privilege of royalty 

Is safe, and all the barony 

Worshipped is in its estate. 

The people stands in obeisance 

Under the rule of governance." 

Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician 
by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his 
incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his Clerk's 
Tale he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the 
"stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, 
and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his Nun's 
Priesfs Tmle he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions 
of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by a direct reference to the 
Peasants' Rebellion : — 

" So hideous was the noise, ah bencite ! 
That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie 
Not made never shoutes half so shrill, 
When that they any B'^leming meant to kill." 

Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakeably conservative tone in 
the ^<2;//^^ purporting to have been sent by him to King Richard^ 
with its refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and 
its admonition to its sovereign to 

"... Shew forth the sword of castigati&n." 

On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the pass- 
age, at once powerful and touching, in the so-called Parson's Tale 
(the sermon which closes the Canterbury Tales as Chaucer left 
them), in which certain lords are reproached for taking of their 
bondmen amercements , " which might more reasonably be called 
extortions than amercements''' while lords in general are commanded 
to be good to their thralls (serfs), because " those that they clept 
thralls, be God's people; for humble folks be Christ's friends; 
they be contubernially with the Lord." The solitary type, however, 
of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest remem- 
brance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful 
and affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, 
that things are as they should be. This is — not, of course, the 
Parson himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but 
— the Parson's brother, the Ploiighman. He is a true labourer 
and a good, religious and charitable in his life, and always ready 
to pay his tithes. In short, he is a true Christian, but, at the same 



20 CHAUCER. 

time, the ideal rather than the prototype, if one may so say, of the 
conservative working man. 

Such were some, though of course some only, of the general 
currents of English public life in the latter half — Chaucer's half — 
of the fourteenth century. Its social features were naturally in 
accordance with the course of the national history. In the first 
place, the slow and painful process of amalgamation between the 
Normans and the English was still unfinished, though the reign of 
Edward III. went far towards completing what had rapidly advanced 
since the reigns of John and Henry III. By the middle of the 
fourteenth century English had become, or was just becoming, the 
common tongue of the whole nation. Among the political poems 
and songs preserved from the days of Edward II., not a single one 
composed on Enghsh soil is written in French. Parliament was 
opened by an English speech in the year 1363, and in the previous 
year the proceedings in the law courts were ordered to be con- 
ducted in the native tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his Canter- 
bury Tales, it seems still to have continued the pedantic affectation 
of a profession for its members, like Chaucer's Man 'of Law, to 
introduce French law-terms into common conversation ; so that it 
is natural enough to find the Siinwioner following suit, and inter- 
larding his Tale with the Latin scraps picked up by him from the 
decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts. Meanwhile, 
manifold difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion be- 
tween the two races, before the victory of the English language 
showed this fusion to have been in substance accomplished. One 
of these difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as funda- 
mental, has doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on 
either side ; but that it existed is not to be denied. Already in 
those ages the national character and temperament of French and 
Enghsh differed largely from one another ; though the reasons 
why they so differed remain a matter of argument. In a dialogue, 
dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the French inter- 
locutor attributes this difference to the respective national bever- 
ages : " We are nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while 
naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything 
for hquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely greater 
politeness by a living French critic of high repute, according to 
whom the English, still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were 
drunken gluttons, agitated at intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while 
the Normans, on the other hand, lightened by their transplantation, 
and by the admixture of a variety of elements, already found the 
claims of esp7'it developing themselves within them. This is an 
explanation which explains nothing — least of all, the problem : why 
the lively strangers should have required the contact with insular 
phlegm in order to receive the creative impulse — why, in other 
words, Norman-French literature should have derived so enormous 
an advantage from the transplantation of Normans to English 
ground. But the evil days wlien the literary labours of English' 
men had been little better than bond-service to the tastes of theit 



CHAUCER' 21 

foreign masters had passed away, since the Norman barons had, 
from whatever motive, invited the commons of England to take a 
share with them in the national councils. After this, the question 
of the relations between the two languages, and the wider one of 
the relations between the two nationalities, could only be decided 
by the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the 
one side upon the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the 
expression they found in forms of life and literature, had hence- 
forth, so to speak, to stand on their merits ; the days of their 
dominion, as a matter of course, had passed away. 

Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman 
nobles of Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of 
their order. Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the 
Crusaders ; but it was a difficult task to maintain all its laws, 
written and unwritten, in these degenerate days. No laurels were 
any longer to be gained in the Holy Land ; and though the cam- 
paigns of the great German Order against the pagans of Prussia 
and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English knight — 
in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, fought 
there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV., did forty years 
later — yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the 
great mediaeval companies of Knights, the most famous had, early 
in the century, perished under charges which were undoubtedly 
in the main foul fictions, but at the same time were only too much 
in accord with facts betokening an unmistakeable decay of the true 
spirit of chivalry; before the century closed, lawyers were rolling 
parchments in the halls of the Templars by the Thames. Thus, 
though the age of chivalry had not yet ended, its supremacy was 
already on the wane, and its ideal was growing dim. In the history 
of English chivalry the reign of Edward III. is memorable, not 
only for the foundation of our most illustrious order of knighthood, 
but likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and courtesy, 
as well on the part of the King when in his better days, as on that 
of his heroic son. Yet it cannot be by accident that an undefinable 
air of the old-fashioned clings to that most delightful of all Chau- 
cer's character sketches, the Knight of the Canterbtiry Tales. 
His warlike deeds at Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere, may be 
illustrated from those of more than one actual knight of the times : 
and the whole description of him seems founded on one by a 
French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at least the exter- 
nal features of a knight of the old school. The chivalry, however, 
which was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly 
far removed from the sturdy simplicity of Chaucer's Knight, and 
inwardly often rotten in more than one vital part. In show and 
splendour a higher point was probably reached in Edward III.'s 
than in any preceding reign. The extravagance in dress which 
prevailed in this period is too well known a characteristic of it to 
need dwelling upon. Sumptuary laws in vain sought to restrain 
this foible ; and it rose to such a pitch as even to oblige men, lest 
they should be precluded from indulging in gorgeous raiment, to 



22 CHAUCER, 

abandon hospitality, a far more amiable species of excess. When 
the kinds of clothing respectively worn by the different classes 
served as distinctions of rank, the display of splendour in one class 
could hardly fail to provoke emulation in the others. The long- 
lived EngHsh love for " crying " colours shows itself amusingly 
enough in the early pictorial representations of several of Chau- 
cer's Canterbury pilgrims, though in floridity of apparel, as of 
speech, the youthful Squire bears away the bell : — 

" Embroidered was he, as it were a mead 
All full freshest flowers, white and red." _y 

But of the artificiality and extravagance of the costumes of these 
times we have direct contemporary evidence and loud contemporary 
complaints. Now, it is the jagged cut of the garments, punched and 
shredded by the man-milliner; now, thfe wide and high collars and 
the long-pointed boots, which attract the indignation of the moralist : 
at one time he inveighs against the " horrible disordinate scantness " 
of the clothing worn by gallants, at another against the " out- 
rageous array " in which ladies love to exhibit their charms. The 
knights' horses are decked out with not less finery than are the 
knights themselves, with " curious harness, as in saddles and bridles, 
cruppers and breastplates, covered with precious clothing, and with 
bars and plates of gold and silver.' And though it is hazardous to 
stigmatise the fashions of any one period as specially grotesque, 
yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court beauty ap- 
pearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun ; while even a 
lady from a manufacturing district, the Wife of Bath, m,?i\its the 
most of her opportunities to be seen as well as to see. Her 
" kerchiefs " were " full fine " of texture, and weighed, one might be 
sworn, ten pound — 

" That on a Sunday were upon her head, 
Her hosen too were of fine scarlet re*d, 
Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new. 

****** 
Upon an ambler easily she sat, 
Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat, 
As broad as is a buckler or a targe.'' 

So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs 
on her feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of 
any period. It might, perhaps, be shown how, in more important 
artistic efforts than fashions of dress, this age displayed its aversion 
from simplicity and moderation. At all events, the love of the 
florid and overloaded declares itself in what we know concerning 
the social hfe of the nobility, as, for instance, we find that life re- 
flected in the pages of Froissart, whose counts and lords seem 
neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves, -nor to talk, 
pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The Vows of the Heron, 3, 
poem of the earlier part of King Edward III.'s reign, contains a 



CHAUCER. 



23 



choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths ; and in a humbler 
way the rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance 
of their rulers, and in the words of the Parsoii's Tale, " dismem- 
bered Christ by soul, heart bones, and body." 

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed 
in the social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must 
have largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly 
dehghted. The relation between knight and lady plays a great 
part in the history as well as in the literature of the later Planta- 
genet period ; and incontestably its conceptions of this relation 
still retained much of the pure sentiment belonging to the best 
and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The highest religious 
expression which has ever been given to man's sense of woman's 
mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally 
dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin^King Edward III. ded- 
icated his principal religious foundation ; and Chaucer, to whatever 
extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance 
with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion 
towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the 
Praise of lVo?nen, in which she is enthusiastically recognised as the 
representative of the whole of her sex, is generall}^ rejected as not 
Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," begin- 
ning 

" Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled," 

seems to be correctly described as Oratio Gallfridi Chancer; 
and in Chance?-'' s A. B. C called La Pi^iere de Notice Dajne, a 
translation by him from a French original, we have a long address 
to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins 
with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succes- 
sion. Nor, apart from the religious sentiment, had men yet alto- 
gether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly love, destined though 
this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time, until at last the 
Mo7't d^Arthtire was the favourite literary nourishment of the 
minions and mistresses of Edward IV. 's degenerate days. In his 
Book of the Dnchess Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly 
love, together with one of true maiden purity. The lady celebrated 
in this poem was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting with their 
exploits, to send her knights upon errands of chivalry. — 

"... Into Walachy, 
To Prussia, and to Tartary, 
To Alexandria or Turkey." 

And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom 
might have been applied the description given by the heroine of 
Chaucer's Troilus and Cresszd oi her lover, and of that which at 
tracted her in him : — 

" For trust ye well that your estate royal. 
Nor vain delight, nor only worthliness 



24 CHAUCER. 

Of you in war or tourney martial, 

Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches, 

Of these none made me rue on your distress; 

But moral virtue, grounded tip on truth, 

That was the cause I first had on you ruth. 

" And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had, 
And that ye had (as methought) in despite 
Everything that tended unto bad, 
As rudeness, and as popular appetite, _ 
And that your reason bridled your delight ; 
'Twas these did make 'bove every creature 
That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure." 

And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of 
the better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made 
war upon female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted 
of their conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the com- 
panies which in the House of Fame sought the favour of its 
mistress, Chaucer vigorously satirises the would-be lady-killers, 
who were content with the reputation of accomplished seducers ; 
and in Troilus and Cressid a shrewd observer exclaims with the 
utmost vivacity against 

" Such sort of folk — what shall I clepe them ? what t 
That vaunt themselves of women, and by name, 
That yet to them ne'er promised this or that, 
Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat." 

The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes 
that the harm which is in this world springs as often from folly as 
from malice. But a deeper feeling animates the lament of the 
"good Alceste," in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, 
that among men the betrayal of women is now " held a game." So 
indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too close an accord- 
ance with examples set in the highest places in the land. If we 
are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the 
amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of 
John of Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law 
with a nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married 
one of his ow.n daughters ! But nowhere was the deterioration of 
sentiment on this head more strongly typified than in Edward III. 
himself. The King, who (if the pleasing tale be true which gave 
rise to some beautiful scenes in an old English drama) had in his 
early days royally renounced an unlawful passion for the fair 
Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once violating his 
conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake of 
strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter 
— the device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle 
of conduct — died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in 
England, as in France, the ascendency is gained by ignobler views 
concerning the relation between the sexes — a relation to which the 



CHAUCER. 



25 



whole system of chivalry owed a great part of its vitality, and on 
the view of which prevailing in the most influential class of any 
nation, the social health of that nation must inevitably in no small 
measure depend. Meanwhile, the artificialities by means of which 
in France, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was sought 
to keep alive an organised system of sentimentality in the social 
dealings between gentlemen and ladies, likewise found admission 
in England, but only in a modified degree. Here the fashion in 
question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic Hterature, 
and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and worship 
of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's 
Legend of Good Women ^ and in the Flower and the Leaf a most 
pleasing poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfor- 
tunately no longer possible to number among his genuine works. 
The poem of the Court of Love, which was likewise long erron- 
eously attributed to him, may be the original work of an Enghsh 
author ; but in any case its main contents are a mere adaptation of 
a pecuhar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions common to 
chivalry in general. 

Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry 
(though not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would 
certainly be rash to assert that its day was passing away in the 
latter half of the fourteenth century. It has, indeed, been pointed 
out that the date at which Wyclif 's career as a reformer may be 
said to have begun almost coincides with that of the climax and 
first decline of feudal chivalry in England. But, without seeking 
to interpret coincidences, we know that, though the influence of 
the Christian Church, and that of its Roman branch in particular, 
has asserted and re-asserted itself in various ways and degrees in 
various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch of its moral 
omnipotence had come to an end many generations before the dis- 
ruption of its external framework. In the fourteenth century men 
had long ceased to look for the mediation of the Church between 
an overbearing Crown and a baronage and commonalty eager 
for the maintenance of their rights or for the assertion of their 
claims. On the other hand, the conflicts which still recurred be- 
tween the temporal power and the Church had as little reference 
as ever to spiritual concerns. Undoubtedly, the authority of the 
Church over the minds of the people still depended in the main 
upon the spiritual influence she exercised over them ; and the 
desire for a reformation of the Church, which was already making 
itself felt in a gradually widening sphere, was, by the great majority 
of those who cherished it, held perfectly compatible with a recog- 
nition of her authority. The world, it has been well said, needed 
an enquiry extending over three centuries, in order to learn to walk 
without the aid of the Church of Rome. Wyclif, who sought to 
emancipate the human conscience from reliance upon any earthly 
authority intermediate between the soul and its Maker, reckoned 
without his generation ; and few, except those with whom audacity 
took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme results oi 



26 CHAUCER. 

his speculations. The Great Schism rather stayed than prob g^ 
the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was iio-w- 
no longer necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the hench- 
man of the arch-foe across the narrow seas. 

But although the progress of English sentiment towards the 
desire for liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a lono- 
and seemingly decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth, as in the 
sixteenth, century the most active cause of the alienation of the 
people from the Church was the conduct of the representatives of 
the Church themselves. The Reformation has most appropriately 
retained in history a name at first unsuspiciously apphed to the re- 
moval of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and in the life 
of the clergy. What aid could be derived by those who really 
hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the 
thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the 
most common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later 
Middle Ages ? Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders 
of English benefices, who left their flocks to be tended by deputy, 
and to be shorn by an army of the most offensive kind of tax-gath- 
erers, the native clergy included many species, but among them 
few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a high ideal of 
religious life. The times had by no means come to an end when 
many of the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in war- 
like prowess. Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after 
persecuting the heretics at home, had commanded an army of cru- 
saders in Flanders, levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI. against the 
anti-Pope Clement VII. and his adherents, was in the poet Gower's 
mind when he complains that while 

"... The law is ruled so, 
That clerks unto the war intend, 
I wot not how they should amend 
The woeful world in other things, 
And so make peace between the Idngs 
After the law of charity, 
Which is the duty properly 
Belonging unto the priesthood." 

A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself 
against the extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified 
clergy indulged. The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great 
prelates had ample means for defraying in the revenues of their 
sees ; while lesser dignitaries had to be active in levying their dues 
or the fines of their courts, lest everything should flow into the re-, 
ceptacles of their superiors. So in Chaucer's Friar'' s Tale an un« 
friendly Regular says of an archdeacon : — 

^_* For smalle tithes and for small offering 
He made the people piteously to sing. 
For ere the bishop caught them on his hook, 
They were down in the archedeacon's book." 



CHAUCER, 27 

As a matter of course, the worthy who filled the office of Su7nmoner 
to the court of the archdeacon in question had a keen eye for the 
profitable improprieties subject to its penalties, and was aided in 
his efforts by the professional abettors of vice whom he kept " ready 
to his hand." Nor is it strange that the undisguised worldliness 
of many members of the clerical profession should have reproduced 
itself in other lay subordinates, even in the parish clerks, at all 
times apt to copy their betters, though we would fain hope such 
was not the case with the parish clerk, " the jolly Absalom " of the 
Miller's Tale. The love of gold had corrupted the acknowledged 
chief guardians of incorruptible treasures, even though few may 
have avowed this love as openly as the " idle " Canon, whose Yeo- 
man had so strange a tale to tell to the Canterbury pilgrims con- 
cerning his master's absorbing devotion to the problem of the mul- 
tiplication of gold. To what a point the popular discontent with 
the vices of the higher secular clergy had advanced in the last 
decennium of the century, may be seen from the poem called the 
Co?nJ)laint of the Ploughman — a production pretending to be by 
the same hand which in the Vision had dwelt on the sufferings of 
the people and on the sinfulness of the ruling classes. Justly or 
unjustly, the indictment was brought against the priests of being 
the agents of every evil influence among the people, the soldiers of 
an army of which the true head was not God, but Behal. 

In earlier days the Church had known how to compensate the 
people for the secular clergy's neglect, or imperfect performance, 
of its duties. But in no respect had the ecclesiastical world more 
changed than in this. The older monastic Orders had long since 
lost themselves in unconcealed worldliness ; how, for instance, had 
the Benedictines changed their character since the remote times 
when their Order had been the principal agent in revivifying the 
religion of the land ! Now, they were taunted with their very name, 
as having been bestowed upon them "by antiphrasis," i.e., by con- 
traries. From many of their monasteries, and from the inmates 
who dwelt in these comfortable halls, had vanished even all pre- 
tence of disguise. Chaucer's Monk paid no attention to th^ rule of 
St. Benedict, and of his disciple St. Maur, 

" Because that it was old and somewhat strait ; " 

and preferred to fall in with the notions of later times. He was an 
"outrider, that loved venery," and whom his tastes and capabilities 
would have well qualified for the dignified post of abbot. He had 
"full many a dainty horse " in his stable, and the swiftest of grey- 
hounds to boot ; and rode forth gaily, clad in superfine furs and a 
hood elegantly fastened with a gold pin, and tied into a love-knot 
at the "greater-end," while the bridle of his steed jingled as if its 
rider had been as good a knight as any of them — thrs last, by the 
way, a mark of ostentation against which Wyclif takes occasion 
specially to inveigh. This Monk (and Chaucer must say that he 
was. wise in his generation) could not understand why he should 



28 CHA UCER, 

study books and unhinge his mind by the effort ; life was not worth 
having at the price ; and no one knew better to what use to put the 
pleasing gift of existence. Hence mine host of the Tabard, a very 
competent critic, had reason for the opinion which he communi- 
cated to the Monk : — 



* It is a noble pasture where thou go'st ; 
Thou art not like a penitent or ghost' 



In the Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becom- 
ing usual. But httle in the way of religious guidance could fall to 
the lot of a sisterhood presided over by such a Prioress as Chaucer's 
Madame Eglantine, whose mind — possibly because her nunnery 
fulfilled the functions of a finishing school for young ladies — was 
mainly devoted to French and deportment, or by such a one as the 
historical Lady Juliana Berners, of a rather later date, whose leis- 
ure hours produced treatises on hunting and hawking, and who 
would probably have, on behalf of her own sex, echoed the Monk^s 
contempt for the prejudice against the participation of the Religious 
in field-sports : — 

" He gave not for his text a pulled hen 
That saith, that hunters be no holy men." 

On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at 
alater date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as 
the secular clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, 
any longer satisfy the reason of their being. In the fourteenth 
century the Dominicans, or Black Friars, who at London dwelt in 
such magnificence that king and Parliament often preferred a so- 
journ with them to abiding at Westminster, had in general grown 
accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the spiritual direction 
of the higher classes. But though they counted among them 
Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the 
philosophical Strode "), they, in truth, never played a more than 
secondary part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery 
of the Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was 
never congenial. Of far greater importance for the population of 
England at large was the Order of the Franciscans, or (as they 
were here wont to call themselves or to be called) Minorites or 
Grey Friars. To them the poor had habitually looked for domestic 
ministrations, and for the inspiring and consoling eloquence of the 
pulpit ; and they had carried their labours into the midst of the 
suffering population, not afraid of association with that poverty 
which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or of 
contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing 
from the short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had 
become a learned as well as a ministering and preaching Order ; 
and it was precisely from among them that, at Oxford and else- 
where, sprang a succession of learned monks, whose names are in- 
separably connected with some of the earliest English growths of 



CHAUCEk. 



29 



philosophical speculation and scientific research. Nor is it pos- 
sible to doubt that in the middle of the thirteenth century the 
monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised an appreciable in- 
fluence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of unequalled 
importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But in the 
Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change, which 
may be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which they 
had been honourably distinguished ; and in England, as elsewhere, 
the spirit of the words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. 
Francis of Assisi was being verified by his degenerate children : — 

"So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth 
A good beginning doth no longer last 
Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth. " 

Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what 
their predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful in- 
fluence over the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear, 
as heretofore, to represent a troublesome rjiemento of unexciting 
religious obligations ; " Preach not/' says Chaucer's Host^ 

" . . .As friars do in Lent, 
That they for our old sins may make us weep, 
Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep." 

But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well 
as to deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying 
against St. Francis, and desiderate for them an actual abode of fire, 
resembling that of which, in their favourite religious shows, they 
were wont to present the mimic semblance to the multitude. It 
was they who became in England, as elsewhere, the purveyors of 
charms and the organisers of. pious frauds, while the learning for 
which their Order had been famous was withering away into the 
yellow leaf of scholasticism. The Friar in general became the 
common butt of literary satire ; and though the populace still re- 
mained true to its favourite guides, a reaction was taking place in 
favour of the secular as against the regular clergy in the sympathies 
of the higher classes, and in the spheres of society most open to 
intellectual influences. The monks and the London multitude were 
at one time united against John of Gaunt, but it was from the ranks 
of the secular clergy that Wyclif came forth to challenge the ascen- 
dency of Franciscan scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile 
the poet who in the Poor Parson of the Town paints his ideal of a 
Christian minister — simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work — • 
has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole 
machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and 
altogether sham. In'King Arthur's time, says that accurate and un- 
prejudiced observer, the ^Wife of Bath, the land was filled with 
fairies — now it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of 
the sun. Among them there is the Pardoner — i. e., seller of par- 
dions (indulgences) — with his *' haughty" sermons, delivered "by 



so 



CHAUCER. 



rote " to congregation after congregation in the self-same words, 
and everywhere accompanied by the self-same tricks of anecdotes 
and jokes — with his Papal credentials, and with the pardons he has 
brought from Rome "all hot" — and with precious relics to rejoice 
the hearts of the faithful, and to fill his own pockets with the pro- 
ceeds : to wit, a pillowcase covered with the veil of Our Lady, and 
a piece of the sail of the ship in which St. Peter went out fishing 
on the Lake of Gennesareth. This worthy, who lays bare his own 
motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is manifestly drawn from 
the life; or the portrait could not have been accepted which was 
presented alike by Chaucer, and by his contemporary Langland, 
and (a century and a half later) in the plagiarism of the orthodox 
Catholic John Heywood. There, again, is the Liinitou7'^ a friar 
licensed to beg, and to hear confession and grant absolution, within 
the lijnits of a certain district. He is described by Chaucer with 
so much humour that one can hardly suspect much exaggeration in 
the sketch. In him we have the truly popular ecclesiastic who 
springs from the people, lives among the people, and feels with the 
people. He is the true friend of the poor, and being such, has, as 
one might say, his finger in every pie ; for "a iiy and a friar will 
fall in every dish and every business." His readily-proffered arbi- 
tration settles the differences of the humbler classes at the " love- 
days," a favourite popular practice noted already in the Vision of 
Langland ; nor is he a niggard of the mercies which he is privileged 
to dispense : — 

" Full sweetly did he hear confession, 
And pleasant was his absolution. 
He was an easy man to give penance, 
Whereso wist to have a good pittance ; 
For unto a poor Order for to give, 
Is signe that a man is well y-shrive ; 
For if he gave, he dufste make a vaunt 
He wiste that a man was repentant. 
For many a man so hard is of his heart 
He can not weep although he sorely smart. 
Therefore, instead of weeping and of prayers, 
Men must give silver to the poore Freres," 

Already in the French Roman de la Rose the rivalry between 
the Friars and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, 
evidently unfavourable to the former and favourable to the latter; 
but in England, where Langland likewise dwells upon the jeal- 
ousy between them, it was specially accentuated by the assaults of 
Wyclif upon the Mendicant Orders. Wychf s Simple Priests, who 
at first ministered with the approval of the Bishops, differed from the 
Mendicants— first, by not being beggars ; and, secondly, by being 
poor. They might, perhaps, have themselves ultimately played the 
part of a new Order in England, had not Wyclif himself, by reject- 
ing the cardinal dogma of the Church, severed these followers of his 
from its organism and brought about their suppression. The ques- 
tion as to Chaucer's own attitude towards the Wycliffite movement 



CHAUCER. 



31 



will be more conveniently touched upon below ; but the tone is un- 
mistakeable of the references or allusions to LoUardry which he oc- 
casionally introduces into the mouth of his Host, whose voice is that 
vox -populi which the upper and middle classes so often arrogate 
to themselves. Whatever those classes might desire, it was not 
to have "cockle sown " by unauthorised intruders " in the corn" 
of their ordinary instruction. Thus there is a tone of genuine at- 
tachment to the " vested interest " principle, and of aversion from 
all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the Hosfs ex- 
clamation, uttered after the Reeve has been (in his own style)" ser- 
moning " on the topic of old age : — ■ 

" What availeth all this wit ? 
What .-* should we speak all day of Holy Writ ? 
The devil surely made a reeve to preach ; " 

for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning 
mariner or physician ! 
■~ — Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the 
Church still in possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power 
and privileges — as well as of means for enforcing unity of pro- 
fession which the legislation of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated 
by the prevailing fears of heresy, was still further to increase. On 
the other hand, we find the influence of the clergy over the minds 
of the people diminished, though not extinguished. This was, in 
the case of the higher secular clergy, partly attributable to their 
self-indulgence or neglect of their functions, partly to their having 
been largely superseded by the Regulars in the control of the relig- 
ious life of the people. The Orders we find no longer at the height 
of their influence, but still powerful by their wealth, their numbers, 
there traditional hold upon the lower classes, and their determina- 
tion to retain this hold even by habitually resorting to the most du- 
bious of methods. Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, 
and doubtless may also assume it to have lingered among some of 
the regular, some of the salt left whose savour consists in a single- 
minded and humble resolution to maintain the highest standard of 
a rehgious life. But such " clerks " as these are at no time the 
most easily found, because it is not they who are always, running 
" unto London, unto St. Paul's," on urgent private affairs. What 
wonder that the real teaching of Wychf, of which the full signifi- 
cance could hardly be understood but by a select few, should have 
virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which the various 
agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious reform 
with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in char- 
acter and ahke to require suppression ! In truth, of course, these 
movements and their agents were often very different from one 
another in their ends, and were not to be suppressed by the same 
processes. 

It should not be forgotten that in tliis century learning was, 
though only very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy 



32 CHAUCER. 

alone. Much doubt remains as to the extent of education — if a 
little reading and less writing deserve the name — among the higher 
classes in this period of our national life. A cheering sign appears 
in the circumstance that the legal deeds of this age begin to bear 
signatures, and a reference to John of Trevisa would bear out 
Hallam's conjecture, that in the year 1400 " the average instruction 
of an English gentleman of the first class would comprehend com- 
mon reading and writing, a considerable knowledge of French, 
and a slight tincture of Latin." Certain it is that in this century 
the barren teaching of the Universities advanced but little towards 
the true end of all academical teaching — the encouragement and 
spread of the highest forms of national culture. To what use 
could a gentleman of Edward III.'s or Richard 1 1. 's day have 
put the acquirements of a Cle7'k of Oxenford in Aristotelian logic, 
supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the rhetori- 
cal works of Cicero ? Chaucer's scholar, however much his learned 
modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend 
him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in 
which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the 
means with which to purchase more of his beloved books. Prob- 
ably no trustworthier conclusions as to the hterary learning and 
studies of those days are to be derived from any other source than 
from a comparison of the few catalogues of contemporary libraries 
remaining to us ; and these help to show that the century was ap- 
proaching its close before a few sparse rays of the first dawn of 
the Italian Renascence reached England. But this ray was com- 
municated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities ; 
and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind 
was directly due to profane poets— men of the world, who, like 
Chaucer, quoted authorities even more abundantly than they used 
them, and made some of their happiest discoveries after the fashion 
in which the Oxford Clerk came across Petrarch's Latin version 
of the story of Patient Grissel : as it were by accident. There is 
only too ample a justification for leaving aside the records of the 
history of learning in England during the latter half of the four- 
teenth century in any sketch of the main influences which in that 
period determined or affected the national progress. It was not by 
his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living con- 
tact with the current of popular thought and feeling. The Univer- 
sities were thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of pre- 
vious ages ; but the ascendency was passing away to which Ox- 
ford, had attained over Paris — during the earlier middle ages, and 
again in the fifteenth century until the advent of the Renascence, 
the central university of Europe in the favourite study of scholastic 
philosophy and theology. 

But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to 
the whole body of the population, exclusively of that great section 
of it which unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very 
few writers, whether poets or historians. In the people at large 
vve may, indeed, easily discern in this period the signs of an ad' 



CHAUCER. 



zz 



vance towards that seif-government which is the true foundation 
of our national greatness. But, on the other hand, it is impossible 
not to observe how, while the moral ideas of the people were still 
under the control of the Church, the State in its turn still ubiquitous- 
ly interfered in the settlement of the conditions of social existence, 
fixing prices, controlling personal expenditure, regulating wages. 
Not until England had fully attained to the character of a commer- 
cial country, which it was coming gradually to assume, did its inhab- 
itants begin to understand the value of that which has gradually 
come to distinguish ours among the nations of Europe, viz., the 
right of individual Englishmen, as well as of the English people, 
to manage their own affairs for themselves. This may help to ex- 
plain what can hardly fail to strike a reader of Chaucer and of the 
few contemporary remains of our literature. About our national 
hfe in this period, both in its virtues and in its vices, there is some- 
thing — it matters little whether we call it — childlike or childish ; in 
its " apert" if not in its " privy" sides it lacks the seriousness be- 
longing to men and to generations, w^ho have learnt to control them- 
selves, instead of relying on the control of others. 

In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several 
of the most salient features in the social life of the period. The 
extravagant expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of 
various kinds encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has 
been already referred to ; it was by no means distinctive of anyone 
class of the population. Among the friars who went about preach- 
ing homilies on the people's favourite vices some humorous rogues 
may, like the Pardoner of the Canterbury Tales, have made a 
point of treating their own favorite vice as their one and un- 
changeable text : — 

" My theme is always one, and ever was : 
Radix vialorum est cupiditas. " 

But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins ; and these 
moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on 
dress the impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting, in their ignor- 
ance of political economy and defiance of common sense, that this 
result was really due to the endless foreign wars. Yet, in contrast 
with the pomp and ceremony of life, upon which so great an amount 
of money and time and thought was wasted, are noticeable short- 
comings by no means uncommon in the case of undeveloped civil- 
isations (as, for instance, among the most typically childish or 
childlike nationalities of the Europe of our own day), viz., discom- 
fort and uncleanliness of all sorts.* To this may be added the ex- 
cessive fondness for sports and pastimes of all kinds, in which na- 
tions are aptest to indulge before or after the era of their highest 
efforts — the desire to make life one long holiday, dividing it be- 
tween tournaments and the dalliance of courts of love, or between 
archery-meetings (skilfully substituted by royal command for less 
useful exercises), and the seductive company of " tumblers," 
"fruiterers," and " waferers." Futhermore, one may notice in all 



34 



CHA UCER. 



Classes a far from eradicated inclination to superstitions of every 
kind — whether those encouraged or those discouraged * by the 
Church — an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked 
by the uncertain gropings of contemporary science. Hence, the 
credulous acceptance of relics like those sold by the Pardoner^ and 
of legends like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the Prioress 
(one of the numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the 
Jews), and by the Second Nun (the supra-sensual story of Saint 
Cecilia). Hence, on the other hand, the greedy hunger for the 
marvels of astrology and alchemy, notwithstanding the growing 
scepticism even of members of a class represented by Chaucer's 
Franklin towards 

"... Such folly 
As in our days is not held worth a fly," 

and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened 
accomplices, such as the gold-making Canon'' s Yeofnan. Hence, 
again, the vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic 
mirror, of which miraculous instrument the Squire's "half-told 
story " describes a specimen, referring to the incontestable author- 
ity of Aristotle and others, who write " in their lives " concerning 
quaint mirrors and perspective glasses, as is well known to those 
who have " heard the books " of these sages. Hence, finally, the 
corresponding tendency to eschew the consideration of serious re- 
ligious questions, and to leave them to clerks, as if they were crabbed 
problems of theology. For, in truth, while the most fertile and fer- 
tilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or were rapidly com- 
ing to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms of the doc- 
trines of the Church — even of the most stimulative as well as of the 
most solemn among them — had grown hard and stiff. To those who 
received, if not to those who taught, these doctrines they seemed alike 
lifeless, unless translated into the terms of the merest earthly tran- 
sactions or the language of purely human relations. And thus, par- 
adoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and conscientious rulers of 
the Church thought themselves on occasion called upon to restrain 
rather than to stimulate the religious ardour of the multitude — fed 
as the flame was by very various materials. Perhaps no more 
characteristic narrative has come down to us from the age of the 
poet of the Canterbufy Tales than the story of Bishop (afterwards 
Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury Pilgrims. In the year 
1370 the land was agitated through its length and breadth, on the 
occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint, Thomas the 
Martyr. The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the famil- 
iar Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their 
companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London. They 
demanded hi'? blessing; but, to their astonishment and indignation, 
he seized the occasion to read a lesson to the crowd on the useless- 

* " For holy Church's faith, in our belief, 
SuSereth no illusion us to erieve." 

The Franklin's Tale. 



CHA UCER. 



35 



ness to unrepentant sinners of the plenary indulgeHces,£or the sake 
of which they were wending their way to the Martyr's shrine. The 
rage of the multitude found a mouthpiece in a soldier, who loudly 
upbraided the Bishop for stirring up the people against St. Thomas, 
and warned him that a shameful death would befall him in conse- 
quence. The multitude shouted Aineii — and one is left to wonder 
whether any of the pious pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's 
manly truthfulness swelled the mob which eleven years later 
butchered " the plunderer," as it called him, " of the Commons." 
It is such ghmpses as this which show us how important the Church 
had become towards the people. Worse was to ensue before the 
better came ; in the mean time, the nation was in that stage of its 
existence when the innocence of the child was fast losing itself, 
without the self-control of the man having yet taken its place. 

But the heart of England was sound the while. The national 
spirit of enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to ship- 
man ; and faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed 
the highest though not the universal virtues of her sex. The 
value of such evidence as the mind of a great poet speaking in his 
works furnishes for a knowledge of the times to which he belongs 
is inestimable ; for it shows us what has survived, as well as what 
what was doomed to decay, in the life of the nation with which that 
mind was in sensitive sympathy. And it therefore seemed not in- 
appropriate to approach, in the first instance, from this point of 
view, the subject of this biographical essay — Chaucer, "the poet 
of the dawn : " for in him there are many things significant of the 
age of transition in which he lived ; in him the mixture of French- 
man and Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their 
language is in the diction of his poems. His gaiety of heart is 
hardly English ; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not invari- 
ably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of 
which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy 
way of ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; 
nor his light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an 
immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no 
share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts 
unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ulti- 
mately made characteristic of' Englishmen. But he is English in 
his freedom and frankness of spirit ; in his manliness of mind ; in 
his preference for the good in things as they are to the good in 
things as they might be ; in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. 
Of the great movement which was to mould the national character 
for at least a long series of generations he displays no serious fore- 
knowledge ; and of the elements already preparing to affect the 
course of that movement he shows a very incomplete conscious- 
ness. But of the health and strength which, after struggles many 
and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, 
he, more than any of his contemporaries, is the living type and the 
speaking witness. Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he 
stands half in and half out of the Middle Ages, half in half out of a 



36 CHA UCER. 

phase of our national life, which we can never hope to understand 
more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together 
with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom is to 
enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our 
literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal freshness—' 
which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery of our 
great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so inex- 
haustible for the historical as well as for the literary student. 



CHAUCER. 3y 



CHAPTER II. 

CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS. 

Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion 
concerning the period of Geotfrey Chaucer's birth, the precise 
date of which is very unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better 
fortune has attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in 
those of other great men, have been directed to the very secondary 
question of ancestry and descent — a question to which, in the ab- 
stract at all events, no man ever attached less importance than he. 
Although the name Chaucer is (according to Thynne) to be found 
on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves that the poet 
himself came of " high parage," than the reverse is to be concluded 
from the nature of his coat-of-arms, which Speght thought must 
have been taken out of the 27th and 28th Propositions of the First 
Book of Euchd. Many a warrior of the Norman Conquest was 
known to his comrades only by the name of the trade which he had 
plied in some French or Flemish town, before he attached himself 
a volunteer to Duke William's holy and lucrative expedition ; and 
it is doubtful whether, even in the fourteenth century, the name 
Le Chaucer is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a surname, 
or whether, in some instances, it is not merely a designation of the 
owner's trade. Thus we should not be justified in assuming a 
French origin for the family from which Richard le Chaucer, whom 
we know to have been the poet's grandfather, was descended. 
Whether or not he was at any time a shoemaker [chazicier, maker 
of chausses), and accordingly belonged to a gentle craft otherwise 
not unassociated with the history of poetry, Richard was a citizen 
of London, and vintiier, like his son John after him, John Chaucer, 
whose wife's Christian name may be with a tolerable safety set 
down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not far 
from the arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury 
or beyond, and in the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in 
Chaucer's own day emptied its travellers on their errands, sacred 
or profane, into the great Southern road, the Via Appia of Eng- 
land, The house afterwards descended to John's son, Geoffrey, 
who released his right to it by deed in the year 1380. Chaucer's 
father was probably a man of some substance, the most usual per- 
sonal recommendation to great people in one of his class. For he 
was at least temporarily connected with the Court, inasmuch as he 
attended Kmg Edward II L and Queen Philippa on the memorable 



38 CHA UCER. 

journey to Flanders and Germany, in the course of which the 
EngHsh monarch was proclaimed Vicar of the Holy Roman Em- 
pire on the left bank of the Rhine. John Chaucer died in 1366, 
and in course of time his widow married another citizen and vint- 
ner. Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-blood, 
was likewise a member of the same trade ; so that the young Geof- 
frey was certainly not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence. 
The Host of the Canterbury Tales, though he takes his name from 
an actual personage, may therefore have in him .touches of a family 
portrait ; but Chaucer himself nowhere displays any traces of a 
hereditary devotion to Bacchus, and makes so experienced a prac- 
titioner as the Pardoner the mouthpiece of as witty an invective 
against drunkenness as has been uttered by any assailant of our 
existing licensing laws. Chaucer's own practice, as well as his 
opinion on this head, is sufficiently expressed in the characteristic 
words he puts into the mouth of Cressid : — 

" In everything, I wot, there lies measure : 
For though a man forbid all drunkenness, 
He biddeih not that every creature 
Be drinkless altogether, as I guess." 

Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day 
of his birth (whenever it befell) to the year 1357. His earlier biog- 
raphers, who supposed him to have been born in 1328, had ac- 
cordingly a fair field open for conjecture and speculation. Here it 
must suffice to risk the asseveration that he cannot have accom- 
panied his father to Cologne in 1338, and on that occasion have been 
first " taken notice of" by king and queen, if he was not born till 
two or more years afterwards. If, on the other hand, he was born 
in 1328, both events 7nay have taken place. On neither supposi- 
tion is there any reason for believing that he studied at one — or at 
both — of our English Universities. The poem cannot be accepted 
as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by a mere dra- 
matic assumption) declares : — 

" Philogenet I call'd am far and near, 
Of Cambridge clerk ; " 

nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the Clerk, 
who is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury 
Pilgrims, is an Oxonian. The enticing enquiry as to which of the 
sister Universities may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, 
be allowed to drop, together with the subsidiary question, whether 
stronger evidence of local colouring is furnished by the Miller's 
picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the 
Reeve's rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken 
by two undergraduates of the " Solar Hall " at Cambridge. Equally 
baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, 
that he completed his academical studies at Paris — and equally 
futile the concomitant fiction that in France " he acquired much ap* 



CHAUCER. 39 

plause by his literary exercises." Finally, we have the tradition 
that he was a member of the Inner Temple— which is a conclusion 
deduced from a piece of genial scandal as to a record having been 
seen in that inn of a fine imposed upon him for beating a friar in 
Fleet Street. This story was early placed by Thynne on the horns 
of a sufiBciently decisive dilemma : in the days of Chaucer's youth, 
lawyers had not yet been admitted into the Temple ; and in the 
days of his maturity he is not very likely to have been found en- 
gaged in battery in a London thoroughfare. 

We now desert the region of groundless conjecture, in order, 
with the year 1357, to arrive at a firm though not very broad foot- 
ing of facts. In this year, " Geoffrey Chaucer " (whom it would be 
too great an effort of scepticism to suppose to have been merely a 
namesake of the poet) is mentioned in the Household Book of Eliz- 
abeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Prince Lionel (third son of King 
Edward III., and afterwards Duke of Clarence), as a recipient of 
certain articles of apparel. Two similar notices of his name occur 
up to the year 1359. He is hence concluded to have belonged to 
Prince Lionel's establishment as squire or page to the Lady Eliza- 
beth ; and it was probably in the Prince's retinue that he took part 
m the expedition of King Edward III. into France, which began 
at the close of the year 1359 with the ineffectual siege of Rheims, 
and in the next year, after a futile attempt upon Paris, ended with 
the compromise of the Peace of Bretigny. In the course of this 
campaign Chaucer was taken prisoner ; but he was released with- 
out much loss of time, as appears by a document bearing date 
March ist, 1360, in which the King contributes the sum of 16/. for 
Chaucer's ransom. We may, therefore, conclude that he missed 
the march upon Paris, and the sufferings undergone by the English 
army on their road thence to Chartres — the most exciting experi- 
ences of an inglorious campaign ; and that he was actually set free 
by the Peace. When, in the year 1367, we next meet with his 
name in authentic records, his earliest known patron, the Lady 
Ehzabeth, is dead ; and he has passed out of the service of Prince 
Lionel into that of King Edward himself, as Valet of whose 
Chamber or household he receives a yearly salary for life of twenty 
marks, for his former and future services. Very possibly he had 
quitted Prince Lionel's service when, in 1361, that Prince had, by 
reason of his marriage with the heiress of Ulster, been appointed 
to the Irish government by his father, who was supposed at one 
time to have destined him for the Scottish throne. 

Concerning the doings of Chaucer in the interval between his 
liberation from his French captivity and the first notice of him as 
Valet of the King's Chamber we know nothing at all. During these 
years, however, no less important a personal event than his mar- 
riage was by earlier biographers supposed to have occurred. On 
the other hand, according to the view which commends itself to 
several eminent living commentators of the poet, it was not court- 
ship and marriage, but a hopeless and unrequited passion, which 
absorbed these years of his life. Certain stanzas in which, as they 



40 



CHA UCER. 



think, It*- gavo utterance to this passion are by them ascribed to 
one of these years ; so that, if their view were correct, the poem in 
question would have to be regarded as the earliest of his extant 
productions. The problem which we have indicated must detain 
us for a moment. 

It is attested by documentary evidence that in the year 1374 
Chaucer had a wife by name Philippa, who had been in the service 
of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and of his Duchess (doubt- 
less his second wife, Constance), as well as in that of his mother, 
the good Queen Philippa, and who on several occasions afterwards, 
besides special new-year's gifts of silver-gilt cups from the Duke, 
received her annual pension of ten marks through her husband. It 
is likewise proved that, in 1366, a pension of ten marks was granted 
to a Philippa Chaucer, one of the ladies of the Queen's Chamber. 
Obviously, it is a highly probable assumption that these two Phil- 
ippa Chancers were one and the same person ; but in the absence 
of any direct proof i,t is impossible to affirm as certain, or to deny 
as demonstrably untrue, that the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 owed 
her surname to marriage. Yet the view was long held, and 
is still maintained by writers of knowledge and insight, that the 
Philippa of 1366 was at that date Chaucer's wife. In or before that 
year he married, it was said, Philippa Roet, daughter of Sir Paon 
de Roet of Hainault, Guienne King of Arms, who came to England 
in Queen Philippa's retinue in 1328. This tradition derived special 
significance from the fact that another daughter of Sir Paon, Katha- 
rine, widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, was successively governess, 
mistress, and (third) wife to the Duke of Lancaster, to whose ser- 
vice both Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer were at one time attached. 
It was apparently founded on the circumstance that Thomas 
Chaucer, the supposed son of the poet, quartered the Roet arms 
with his own. But unfortunately there is no evidence to show that 
Thomas Chaucer was a son of Geoffrey ; and the superstructure 
must needs vanish with its basis. It being then no longer indis- 
pensable to assume Chaucer to have been a married man in 1366, 
the Philippa Chaucer of that year may have been only a namesake, 
and possibly a relative, of Geoffrey ; for there were other Chancers 
in London besides him and his father (who died this year), and one 
Chaucer at least has been found who was well-to-do enough to have 
a Damsel of the Queen's Chamber for his daughter in these cer- 
tainly not very exclusive times. 

There is, accordingly, no proof that Chaucer was a married 
man before 1374, when he is known to have received a pension for 
his own and his wife's services. But with this negative result we 
are asked not to be poor-spirited enough to rest content. At the 
opening of his Book of the Duchess^ a poem certainly written 
towards the end of the year 1369, Chaucer makes use of certain ex- 
pressions, both very pathetic and very definite. The most obvious 
interpretation of the lines in question seems to be that they contain 
the confession of a hopeless passion, which has lasted for eight 
years — a confession which certainly seems to come more appropri- 



CHAUCER. 41 

ately and more naturally from an unmarried than from a married 
man. " For eigiit years," he says, or seems to say, " I have loved, and 
loved in vain — and yet my cure is never the nearer. There is but 
one physician that can heal me — but all that is ended and done with. 
Let us pass on into fresh fields ; what cannot be obtained must 
needs be left." It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too 
long to cite in extenso) as a complaint of married life. Many other 
poets have, indeed, complained of their married lives, and Chaucer 
(if the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as 
any. But though such occasional exclamations of impatience or 
regret — more especially when in a comic vein — may receive pardon, 
or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic ver- 
sion of Sterne's '■'■ su7n multum fatigatus de uxore i?iea " would be 
unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly out of charac- 
ter in Chaucer. Even Byron only indited elegies about his married 
life after his wife had left him. 

Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the 
Complaint of the Death of Pity, which purports to set forth " how 
pity is dead and buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a 
hopeless passion, ends with the following declaration, addressed to 
Pity, as in a "bill" or letter : — 

" This is to say : I will be yours for ever, 
Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe; 
Yet shall myspirit nevermore dissever 
From your service, for any pain or woe, 
Pity, whom I have sought so long ago ! 
Thus for your death I may well weep and plain, 
With heart all sore, and full of busy pain." 

If this poem be autobiographical, it would indisputably correspond 
well enough to a period in Chaucer's life, and to a mood of mind 
preceding those to which the introduction to the Book of the 
Duchess belongs. If it be not autobiographical— and in truth there 
is nothing to prove it such, so that an attempt lias been actually 
made to suggest its having been intended to apply to the e:?:pe- 
riences of another man — then tlie Cov2plaint of Pity has no 
special value for students of Chaucer, since its poetic beauty, as 
there can be no harm in observing, is not in itself very great. 

To come to an end of this topic, there seems no possibility of 
escaping from one of the following alternatives : Either the 
Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was Geoffrey Chaucer's wife, whether or 
not she was Philippa Roet before marriage, and the lament of 1369 
had reference to another lad}^ — an assumption to be regretted in 
the case of a married man, but not out of the range of possibility. 
Or — and this seems, on the whole, the most proloable view — the 
Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was a namesake whom Geoffrey married 
some time after 1369 — possibly (of course only ;^(9j-j-/(^/j.') the very 
ladv whom he had loved hopelessly for eight years, and persuaded 
himself that he had at last relinquished, and who had then relented 
after all. This last conjecture it is certainly difficult to reconcile 



42 



CHA UCER 



witn the conclusion at which we arrive on other grounds, that 
Chaucer's married life was not one of preponderating bliss. That he 
and his wife were cousins is a pleasing thought, but one which is 
not made more pleasing by the seeming fact that, if they were so 
related, marriage in their case failed to draw close that hearts' bond 
which such kinship at times half unconsciously knits. 

Married or still a bachelor, Chaucer may fairly be supposed, 
during part of the years previous to that in which we find him 
securely established in the King's service, to have enjoyed a 
measure of independence and leisure open to few men in his rank 
of life, when once the golden days of youth and early manhood 
have passed away. Such years are in many men's lives marked by 
the projection, or even by the partial accomplishment, of hterary 
undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as partake 
of an imitative character. When a juvenile and facile writer's taste 
is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly 
tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others ; translates 
the Iliad or Faust, or suits himself with unsuspecting promptitude 
to the production of masques, or pastorals, or life dramas — or what- 
ever may be the prevailing fashion in poetry — after the manner of 
the favourite Hterary models of the day. A priori, therefore, 
everything is in favour of the belief hitherto universally entertained, 
that among Chaucer's earliest poetical productions was the extant 
English translation of the French Roman de la Rose. That he 
made some translation of this poem is a fact resting on his own 
statement in a passage indisputably written by him (in the Prologue 
to the Legend of Good Women} j nor is the value of this statement 
reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the extraordinary tag 
(if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the extant Canter- 
bury Tales, the Ronaunt of the Rose is passed over in silence, or at 
least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable works which 
the poet is there made to retract. And there seems at least no ne- 
cessity for giving in to the conclusion that Chaucer's translation 
has been lost, and was not that which has been hitherto accepted 
as his. For this conclusion is based upon the use of a formal 
test, which, in truth, need not be regarded as of itself absolutely 
decisive in any case, but which in this particular instance need not 
be held applicable at all. A particular rule against rhyming with 
one anotlier particular sounds, which in his later poems Chaucer 
seems invariably to have followed, need not have been observed by 
him in what was actually, or all but, his earliest. The unfinished 
„ state of the extant translation accords with the supposition that 
Chaucer broke it off on adopting (possibly after conference with 
Gower, who likewise observes -the rule) a more logical practice as 
to the point in question. Moreover no English translation of this 
poem besides Chaucer's is ever known to have existed. 

Whither should the youthful poet, when in search of materials 
on which to exercise a ready but as yet untrained hand, have so 
naturally turned as to French poetry, and in its domain whither so 
eagerly as to its universally acknowledged master-piece .'' French 



CHA UCER 



43 



verse was the delight of the Court, into the service of which he 
was about this time preparing permanently to enter, and with 
which he had been more or less connected from his boyhood. In 
French, Chaucer's contemporary Govver composed not only his first 
longer work, but not less than fifty ballads or sonnets ; and in 
French (as well as in English) Chaucer himself may have possibly 
in his youth set his own 'prentice hand to the turning of '-'•bal- 
lades, rondels, virelayes.^' The time had not yet arrived, though 
it M'as not far distant, when his English verse was to attest his ad- 
miration of Machault, whose fame Froissart and Froissart's imita- 
tions had brought across from the French Court to the English, and 
when Gransson, who served King Richard II. as a squire, was ex- 
tolled by his English adapter as the "flower of them that write in 
France." But as yet Chaucer's own tastes, his French blood, if 
he had any in his veins, and the familiarity with the French tongue 
which he had already had opportunities of acquiring, were more 
likely to commend to him productions of broader literary merits 
and a wider popularity. From these points of view, in the days of 
Chaucer's youth, there was no rival to the Roman de la Rose, one 
of those rare works on which the literary history of whole gener- 
ations and centuries may be said to hinge. The Middle Ages, in 
which, from various causes, the literary intercommunication be- 
tween the nations of Europe was in some respects far livelier than 
it has been in later times, witnessed the appearance of several such 
works — diverse in kind, but similar to one another in the univer- 
sality of their popularity : the Consolatio7i of Philosophy, the 
Divine Comedy, the Imitation of Christ, the Ro7nan de la Rose, 
the Ship of Fools. The favour enjo3"ed by the Roman de la Rose 
was in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this 
work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and " the 
source whence every rhymer drew for his needs "down to the 
period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited 
by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it ex- 
ercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it 
at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the 
renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary lit- 
erary influence admits of a double explanation. But just as the 
authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between two 
personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the 
popularity of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to 
the second and later of the pair. 

To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a 
small town in the valley of the Loire) was due the original concep- 
tion of the Roman de la Rose, for which it is needless to suspect 
any extraneous source. To noveltv of subject he added great in- 
genuity of treatment. Instead of a narrative of warlike adventures 
he offered to his readers a psychological romance, in which a com- 
bination of symbolisations and personified abstractions supplied 
the characters of the moral conflict represented. Bestiaries and 
Lapidaries familiarised men's minds with the art of finding a 



H 



CHAUCER. 



symbolical significance in particular animals and stones ; and the 
language of poets was becoming a language of flowers. On the 
other hand, the personification of abstract qualities was a usage 
largely affected by the Latin writers of the earlier Middle Ages, 
and formed a favourite device of the monastic beginnings of the 
Christian drama. For both these literary fashions, which mild/y 
exercised the ingenuity while deeply gratifying the tastes of medi- 
aeval readers, room was easily found by Guillaume de Lorris within a 
framework in itself both appropriate and graceful. He told (as re- 
produced by his English translator) how in a dream he seemed to 
himself to wake up on a May morning. Sauntering forth, he came 
to a garden surrounded by a wall, on which were depicted many 
unkindly figures, such as Hate and Villainy, and Avarice and Old 
Age, and another thing / 

" That seemed like a hypocrite, / 

And it was clcped pope holy." 

Within, all seemed so delicious that, feeling ready to give an 
hundred pound for the chance of entering, he smote at a small 
wicket, and was admitted by a courteous maiden named Idleness. 
On the sward in the garden were dancing its owner. Sir Mirth, and 
a company of friends ; and by the side of Gladness the dreamer 
saw the God of Love and his attendant, a bachelor named Sweet- 
looking, who bore two bows, each with five arrows. Of these bows 
the one was straight and fair, and the other crooked and unsightly, 
and each of the arrows bore the name of some quality or emotion 
by which love is advanced or hindered. And as the dreamer was 
gazing into the spring of Narcissus (the imagination), he beheld a 
rose-tree "charged full of roses," and, becoming enamoured of one 
of them, eagerly advanced to pluck the object of his passion. In 
the midst of this attempt he was struck by arrow upon arrow,, shot 
" wonder smart " by Love from the strong bow. The arrow called 
Company completes the victory ; the dreaming poet becomes the 
Lover {'VAmaiit)^ and swears allegiance to the God of Love, who 
proceeds to instruct him in his laws ; and the real action (if it is 
to be called such) of the poem begins. Th^s consists in the 
Lover's desire to possess himself of the Rosebud, the opposition of- 
fered to him by powers both good and evil, and by Reason in par- 
ticular, and the support which he receives from more or less dis- 
cursive friends. Clearly, the conduct of such a scheme as this 
admits of being varied in many ways and protracted to any length ; 
but its first conception is easy and natural, and, when it was novel 
to boot, was neither commonplace nor ill-chosen. 

After writing about one-fifth of the 22,ooq verses of which the 
original French poem consists, Guillaume de Lorris, who had ex- 
ecuted his part of the task in full sympathy with the spirit of the 
chivalry of his times, died, and left the work to be continued by 
another trouvh'e, Jean de Meung (so-called from the town, near 
Lorris, in which he lived). " Hobbling John " took up the thread 
of his predecessor's poem in the spirit of a wit and an encyclopa^ 



CHAUCER. 45 

dist. Indeed, the latter appellation suits him in both its special 
and its general sense. Beginning with a long dialogue between 
Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his free- 
dom of criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific 
aid anecdotical. His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abund- 
antly allusive ; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two 
fa\ourite themes of mediaeval satire in general, religious hypocrisy 
(po-sonified in Faux-Semblant, who has been described as one 
of tte ancestors of Tartuffe), and the foibles of women. To the 
gros: salt of Jean de Meung, even more than to the courtly per- 
fume of Guillaume de Lorris, may be ascribed the long-lived pop- 
ularit' of the Ro?nan de la Rose; and thus a work, of which already 
the tli-me and first conception imply a great step forwards from 
the previous range of mediseval poetry, becamera favourite with all 
classes by reason of the piquancy of its flavour, and the quotable 
applicaDility of many of its passages. Out of a chivalrous allegory 
Jean de Meung had made a poputar satire ; and though in its com- 
pleted foim it "could look for no welcome in many a court or castle 
— though Petrarch despised it, and Gerson, in the name of the 
Church, recorded a protest against it — and though a bevy of of- 
fended ladi>s had w^ll-nigh taken the law into their own hands 
against its author — yet it commanded a vast public of admirers. 
And against such a popularity even an offended clergy, though 
aided by the sneers of the fastidious and the vehemence of the fair, 
is wont to cor.tend in vain. 

Chaucer's \ranslation of this poem is thought to have been the 
cause which cilled forth from Eustace Deschamps, Machault's 
pupil and nepLew, the complimentary ballade in the refrain of 
which the Englishman is saluted as 

Giant translateur, noble Geffroi Chancier." 

But whether or not such was the case, his version of the Roman 
de la Rose seem^, on the whole, to be a translation properly so 
called — although, considering the great number of MSS. existing 
of the French original, it would probably be no easy task to verify 
the assertion that in one or the other of these are to be found the 
/ew passages thoug'it to have been interpolated by Chaucer. On 
the other hand, his omissions are extensive ; indeed, the whole of 
his translation amounts to little more than one-third of the French 
original. It is all the more noteworthy that Chaucer reproduces 
only about one-half of the part contributed by Jean de Meung, and 
again condenses this half to one-third of its length. In general, he 
has preserved the French names of localities, and even occasion* 
ally helps himself to a. rhyme by retaining a French word. Occa- 
sionally he shows a certain timidity as a translator, speaking of 
" the tree which in France men call a pine," and pointing out, so 
that there may be no mistake, that mermaidens are called "sereyns " 
{sirhies) in France. On the other hand, his natural vivacity now 
and then suggests to him a turn of phrase or an illustration of his 



46 CHAUCER. 

own. As a loyal English courtier he cannot compare a fair bach- 
elor to any one so aptly as to " the lord's son of Windsor ; " and as 
writing not far from the time when the Statute of Kilkenny was 
passed, he cannot lose the opportunity of inventing an Irish par 
entage for Wicked-Tongue : 

" So full of cursed rage 
It well agreed -with his lineage ; ; 

For him an Irishwoman bare." 

The debt which Chaucer in his later works owed to the Rman 
of the Rose was considerable, and by no means confined t^ the 
favourite May-morning exordium and the recurring machinery of 
a vision — to the origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio lelated 
by Cicero and expounded in the widely-read Commentary o/ Mac- 
robius) the opening lines of the Rojnaimt point. He owe^! to the 
French poem both the germs of felicitous phrases, such as the 
famous designation of Nature as "the Vicar of the Almighty 
Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in passages liie that in 
which he afterwards, with further aid from other source j^ drew the 
character of a true gentleman. But the main service which the 
work of this translation rendered to him was the opportunity which 
it offered of practising and perfecting a ready and happy choice of 
words — a service in which, perhaps, lies the chief us^ of all trans- 
lation, considered as an exercise of style. How far \k had already 
advanced in this respect, and how lightly our language was already 
moulding itself in his hands, may be seen from several passages in 
the poem ; for instance, from that about the middle, where the old 
and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is treated in end- 
less variations. In short, Chaucer executed his task with facility, 
and frequently with grace, though, for one reasqh or another, he 
grew tired of it before he had carried it out with completeness. 
Yet the translation (and this may have been ^mons; the causes 
why he seems to have wearied of it) has, notwitl:^tanding, a certain 
air of schoolwork ; and though Chaucer's next, poem, to which in- 
contestable evidence assigns the date of the yejir 1369, is still very 
far from being wholly original, yet the step is great from the 
Romaunt of the Rose to the Book of the Ducheh. 

Among the passages of the French Roman- de la Rose omitted 
in Chaucer's translation are some containing critical reflexions on 
the character of kings and constituted authorities — a species of ob- 
servations which kings and constituted authorities have never been 
notorious for loving. This circumstance, together with the re- 
ference to Windsor quoted above, suggests the probability that 
Chaucer's connexion with the Court had not been interrupted, or 
had been renewed, or was on the eve of renewing itself, at the time 
when he wrote this translation. In becoming a courtier, he was 
certainly placed within the reach of social opportunities such as in 
his dav he could nowhere else have enjoyed. In England as well 
as in Italy, during the fourteenth and the tivo following centuries, 
as the frequent recurrence of the notion attests, the ''good" 



CHAUCER. 4y 

courtier seemed the perfection of the idea of gentleman. At the 
same time, exaggerated conceptions of the courtly breeding of 
Chaucer's and Froissart's age may very easily be formed ; and it is 
ilmost amusing to contrast with Chaucer's generally liberal notions 
tf manners, severe views of etiquette like that introduced bv him 
a. the close of the Mail of Law's Tale, where he stigmatises as a 
sdecism the statement of the author from whom he copied his nar- 
ratve, that King JEWa. sent his little boy to invite the emperor to 
dimer. " It is best to deem he went himself." 

The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at 
Cout is that of " Valettus " to the King, on as a later document of 
May 1368, has it, of "Valettus Camera Regis "—Valet or Yeoman 
of tie King's Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the 
ordiniry functions of personal attendance— the making of beds, the 
holdiig of torches, the laying of tables, the going on messages, 
etc.— vere usually bestowed upon young men of good family. In 
due coirse of time a royal valet usually rose to the higher post of 
royal squire— either '-of the household" generally, or of a more 
special kind. Chaucer appears in 1368 as an "esquire of less de- 
gree," hs name standing seventeenth in a list, of seven-and-thirty. 
After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by the lower, but several 
times by Latin equivalents of the higher, tide. Frequent entries 
occur of tlie pension or salary of twenty maii<s granted to him for 
life ; and, as will be seen, he soon began to be employed on mis- 
sions abroid. He had thus become a regular member of the royal 
establishment, within the sphere of which we must suppose the as- 
sociations of the next years of his life to have been confined. 
They belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the 
English people and for the Plantagenet dynast}'^, whose glittering 
exploits reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms. 
At home, th;se years were the brief interval between two of the 
chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369)-, and a few 
years earlier the poet of the Vision had given voice to the suffer- 
ings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people 
crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in 
his elegy wrhten in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a 
poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily in- 
consolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince 
was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) 
for that interesting protege of the Plantagenets and representative 
of legitimate right, Don Pedro tlie Cruel, whose daughter the in- 
consolable widower was to espouse in 1372, and whose "tragic" 
downfall Chaucer afterwards duly lamented in his Monk's Tale: — 

" O noble. O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain, 
Whom fortune held so high in majesty ! " 

As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been 

uenched in the sickness which was the harbinger of death ; and 

his younger brother, John of Gaunt, though already known for his 

bravery in the field (he commanded the reinforcements sent to 



48 CHAUCER. 

Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun to play the prominent part in 
politics which he was afterwards to fill. But his day was at hand, 
and the anticlerical tenour of the legislation and of the adminis- 
trative changes of these years was in entire harmony with the 
policy of which he was to constitute himself the representative 
1365 is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and 1371 that of t^e 
dismissal of William of Wykeham. 

John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probablVof 
much the same age as Chaucer, and, like him, now in the prim/ of 
life. Nothing could, accordingly, be more natural than that a riore 
or less intimate relation should have formed itself between t^em. 
This relation, there is reason to believe, afterwards ripenec(, on 
Chaucer's part, into one of distinct political partisanship, of Vhich 
there could as yet (for the reason given above) hardly be a queition. 
There was, however, so far as we know, nothing in Chaucer's/astes 
and tendencies to render it antecedently unlikely that he ihould 
have been ready to follow the fortunes of a prince who entd^ed the 
political arena as an adversary of clerical predominance/ Had 
Chaucer been a friend of it in principle, he would har/ly have 
devoted his first efforts as ai writer to the translation of th/ Roman 
de la Rose. In so far therefore — and in truth it is not vfery far — 
as John of Gaunt may be afterwards said to have been a Wycliffite, 
the same description might probably be applied to Chaudr. With 
such sentiments a personal orthodoxy was fully reconcileable in both 
patron and follower ; and the so-called Chaucer's A. B.Cl a version 
of a prayer to the Virgin in a French poetical '' Pilgrima/e," might 
with equal probability have been put together by him ^ither early 
or late in the course of his life. There was, however, fi tradition, 
repeated by Speght, that this piece was composed " at/the request 
of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer for hei/ private use, 
being a woman in her religion very devout." If so, It must have 
been written before the Duchess's death, which occmred in 1369; 
and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twent}Khree initial 
letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleif inserted in 
the Book of the pious Duchess— herself, in the fervent language of 
the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this world 
with the Virgin's holy name. 

In the autumn of 1369, then, the Duchess Blanche died an early 
death ; and it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his 
marriage with her had brought wealth and a dukedom, ordered 
services in pious remembrance of her, to be held at her grave. The 
elaborate elegy which — very possibly at the widowed Duke's request 
— was composed by Chaucer, leaves no doubt as to the identity of 
the lady whose loss it deplores : — 

. Goode faire White she hight ; 
Thus was my lady named right ; 
For she was both fair and bright." 

But in accordance with the taste of his age, which shunned such 
sheer straightforwardness in poetry, the Book of the Duchess Con» 



CHAUCER. 



49 



tains no further transparent reference to the actual circumstances 
of the wedded life which had come to so premature an end — for 
John of Gaunt had married Blanche of Lancaster in 1359 — and an 
elaborate framework is constructed round the essential theme of 
the poem. Already, however, the instinct of Chaucer's own poetic 
genius had taught him the value of personal directness ; and, arti- 
ficially as the course of the poem is arranged, it begins in the most 
artless and effective fashion with an account given by the poet of 
his own sleeplessness and its cause, already referred to — an open- 
ing- so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart. And 
so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night 
away he sat upright in his bed reading a " romance," which he 
thought better entertainment than chess or draughts. The book 
which he read was the Metamorphoses of Ovid ; and in it he chanced 
on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone — the lovers whom, on their pre- 
mature death, the compassion of Juno changed into the sea-birds 
that bring good-luck to mariners. Of this story (whether Chaucer 
derived it direct from Ovid, or from Machault's French version, is 
disputed), the earlier part serves as the introduction to the poem. 
The story breaks off — with the dramatic abruptness in which 
Chaucer is a master, and which so often distinguishes his versions 
from their originals — at the death of Alcyone, caused by her grief 
at the tidings brought by Morpheus of her husband's death. Thus 
subtly the god of sleep and the death of a loving wife mingle their 
images in the poet's mind ; and with these upon him, he falls asleep 
" right upon his book." 

What more natural, after this, than the dream which came to him? 
It was May, and he lay in his bed at morning-time, having been 
awakened out of his slumbers by the " small fowls," who were 
carolling forth their notes — " some high, some low, and all of one 
accord." The birds singing their matins around the poet, and 
the sun shining brightly through his windows stained with 
many a figure of poetic legend, and upon the walls painted in 
fine colours, " both text and gloss, and all the Romaunt of the 
Rose " — is not this a picture of Chaucer by his own hand, on which 
one may love to dwell ? And just as the poem has begun with a 
touch of natifre, and at the beginning of its main action has returned 
to nature, so through the whole of its course it maintains the same 
tone. The sleeper awakened — still, of course, in his dream — hears 
the sound of the horn, and the noise of huntsmen preparing for the 
chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and follows to the forest, 
where the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character of Carolingian 
legend, and pleasantly revived under this aspect by the modern 
romanticist, Ludwig Tieck — in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering 
allegory for the King) is holding his hunt. The deer having been 
started, the poet is watching the course of the hunt, when he is 
approached by a dog, whicli leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket 
among mighty trees ; and here of a sudden he comes upon a man 
in black, sitting silently by the side of a huge oak. How simple 
and how charmin</-, is the device of the faithful do;r acting as a 



so 



CHAUCER. 



guide into the mournful solitude of the faithful man! For the 
knight whom the poet finds thus silent and alone, is rehearsing to 
himself a lay, " a manner song," in these words : — 

" I have of sorrow so great wone, 
That joye get I never none, 
Now that I see my lady bright, 
"Which I have loved with all my might, 
Is from me dead, and is agone. 
Alas ! Death, what aileth thee 
That thou should'st not have taken me, 
When that thou took'st my lady sweet? 
That was so fair, so fresh, so free, 
So goode, that men may well see 
Of all goodness she had no meet." 

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of faint- 
ing, the poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for 
the intrusion. Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by 
this token of sympathy, brealcs out into the tale of his sorrow which 
forms the real subject of the poem. It is a lament for the loss of 
a wife who was hard to gain (the historical basis of this is unknown, 
but great heiresses are usually hard to gain for cadets even of 
royal houses), and whom, alas ! her husband was to lose so soon 
after he had gained her. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing 
could be more delightful, than the Black Knight's description of 
his lost lady as she was at the time when he wooed and almost de- 
spaired of winning her. Many of the touches in this description — • 
and among them some of the very happiest — are, it is true, bor- 
rowed from the courtly Machault; but nowhere has Chaucer been 
happier, both in his appropriations and in the way in which he has 
really converted them into beauties of his own, than in this, per- 
haps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the whole range of 
our literature. Or is not the following the portrait of an English 
girl, all life and all innocence — a type not belonging, like its oppo- 
site, to any " period " in particular t 

* I saw her dance so comelily, 
Carol and sing so sweetely, 
And laugh, and play so womanly, 
And looke so debonairly, 
So goodly speak and so friendly. 
That, certes, I trow that nevermore 
Was seen so blissful a treasure. 
For every hair upon her head, 
Sooth to say, it was not red. 
Nor yellow neither, nor brown it was, 
Methought most like gold it was. 
And ah ! what eyes my lady had, 
Deb6nair, goode, glad and sad, 
Simple, of good size, not too wide. 
Thereto her look was not aside 
Nor overthwart ; '' 



i 



CHAUCER. 



51 



but so well set that whoever beheld her was drawn and taken up 
by it, every part of him. Her eyes seemed every now and then as 
if she were inclined to be merciful, such was the delusion of fools; 
a delusion in very truth, for 

" It was no counterfeited thing ; 
It was her owne pure looking; 
So the goddess, dame Nature, 
Had made them open by measure 
And close; for were she never so glad, 
Not foolishly her looks were spread. 
Nor wildely, though that she play'd; 
But ever, methought, her eyen said, 
' By God, my wrath is all forgiven.' " 

And at the same time she liked to live so happily that dulness was 
afraid of her : she was neither too " sober " nor too glad ; in short, 
no creature had ever more measure in all things. Such was the 
lady whom the knight had won for himself, and whose virtues he 
cannot weary of rehearsing to himself or to a sympathising auditor. 

'" Sir ! ' quoth I, ' where is she now ? ' 
' Now ? ' quoth he, and stopped anon ; 
Therewith he waxed as dead as stone, 
And said : ' Alas that I was bore ! 
That was the loss ! and heretofore 
I told to thee what I had lost. 
Bethink thee what I said . Thou know'st 
In sooth full little what thou meanest : 
I have lost more than thou weenest. 
God wot, alas \ right that was she.' 
' Alas, sir, how ? what may that be ? ' 
' She is dead.' ' Nay ? ' ' Yes, by my truth 1 
* Is this your loss ? by God, it is ruth.' " 

And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet 
depart to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Rich- 
mond.''), where a bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, 
to let him find himself lying in his bed, and the book, with its 
legend of love and sleep, resting in his hand. One hardly knows 
at whom more to wonder — whether at the distinguished French 
scholar who sees so many trees that he cannot see a forest, and 
who, not content with declaring the Book of the Diichess, as a 
whole as well as in its details, a servile imitation of Machault, 
pronounces it at the same time one of Chaucer's feeblest produc- 
tions ; or at the equally eminent English scholar who, with a flip- 
pancy which for once ceases to be amusing, opines that Chaucer 
ought to " have felt ashamed of himself for this most lame and im- 
potent a conclusion " of a poem " full of beauties," and ought to 
have been "caned for it 1 " Not only was this "lame and impo- 
tent conclusion " imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy, Daph" 



52 CHAUCER. 

naida; * but it is the first passage in Chaucer's writings reveal 
ing, one would have thought unmistakeably, the dramatic power 
which was among his most characteristic gifts. The charm of this 
poem, notwithstanding all the artificialities with which it is overlaid, 
lies in its simplicity and truth to nature. A real human being is 
here brought before us instead of a vague abstraction ; and the 
glow of life is on the page, though it has to tell of death and mourn- 
ing. Chaucer is finding his strength by dipping into the true 
spring of poetic inspiration : and in his dreams he is awaking to 
the real capabilities of his genius. Though he is still uncertain of 
himself and dependent on others, it seems not too much to say that 
already in this Book of the Duchess he is in some measure an 
original poet. 

How unconscious, at the same time, this waking must have been 
is manifest from what little is known concerning the course of 
both his personal and his literary life during the next few years. 
But there is a tide in the lives of poets, as in those of other men, 
on the use or neglect of which their future seems largely to depend. 
For more reasons th^n one, Chaucer may have been rejoiced to be 
employed on the two missions abroad, which apparently formed his 
chief occupation during the years 1370-1373. In the firs,t place, the 
love of books, which he so frequently confesses, must in him have 
been united to a love of seeing men and cities ; few are observers 
of character without taking pleasure in observing it. Of his hterary 
labours he probably took little thought during these years ; al- 
though the visit which in the course of them he paid to Italy may 
be truly said to have constituted the turning-point in his literary 
life. No work of his can be ascribed to this period with certainty; 
none of importance has ever been ascribed to it. 

On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in 
the winter of 1372, visited Genoa and Florence. His object at the 
former city was to negotiate concerning theisettlement of a Genoese 
mercantile factory in one of our ports, for in this century there 
already existed between Genoa and England a commercial inter- 
course, which is illustrated by the obvious etymology of the popular 
X^xvajane occurring in Chaucer in the sense of any small coin.f It 
has been supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, 
whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the 
Cle?'k in the Canterbury Tales that he learnt the story of patient 
Griseldis " at Padua of a worthy clerk . . . now dead," who was 
called " Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may, of course, merely 
imply that Chaucer borrowed the Clei'k's Tale from Petrarch's 
Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which 

* I have been anticipated in pointing out this fact by tlie author of the biographical es- 
say on Spenser in tliis series— an essay to which I cannot help taking this opportunity of 
offering a tribute of sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that 
the inconsolable widower of the Daphfteiida is named Alcyon, while Chaucer's poem 
begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone. Sir Arthur Gorges reappears 
as Alcyon in Colin Clotifs come home agahi. 

t " A jane " is in the Ciei^k's Tale said to be a sufficient value at which to estimate the 
"stormy people." 



CHAUCER. 53 

the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and 
may have been accompanied by the most suitable conversation 
which the imagination can supply ; while, on the other hand, it is 
a conjecture unsupported by any evidence whatever, that a pre- 
vious meeting between the pair had occurred at Milan in 1368, 
when Lionel, Duke of Clarence, was married to his second wife 
with great pomp in the presence of Petrarch and of Froissart. The 
really noteworthy point is this : that while neither (as a matter of 
course) tke translated Romaimt of the Rose nor the Book of the 
Duchess exhibits any traces of Italian influences, the same asser- 
tion cannot safely be made with regard to any important poem pro- 
duced by Chaucer after the date of this Italian journey. The lit- 
erature of Italy, which was — and in the first instance through 
Chaucer himself — to exercise so powerful an influence upon the 
progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what 
measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before 
him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have 
called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio — both his epic 
poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Pe- 
trarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were 
mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness — the immortal De- 
camerone. He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own 
verse, with its exquisite variations of its favourite pure theme and 
its adequate treatment of other elevated subjects; and he might 
gaze down the long vista of pictured reminiscences, grand and 
sombre, called up by the mightiest Muse of the Middle Ages, the 
Muse of Dante. Chaucer's genius, it may be said at once, was 
not transformed hy its contact with Italian literature; for a con- 
scious desire as well as a conscientious effort is needed for bringing 
about such a transformation ; and to compare the results of his first 
Italian journey with those of Goethe's pilgrimage across the Alps, 
for instance, would be palpably absurd. It might even be doubted 
whether, for the themes which he was afterwards Hkely to choose, 
and naturally did choose for poetic treatment, the materials at his 
command in French (and English) poetry and prose would not have 
sufiiced him. As it was, it seems probable that he took many things 
from Italian literature; it is certain that he learnt much from it. 
There seems every reason to conclude that the influence of Italian 
study upon Chaucer made him more assiduous, as well as more 
careful, in the employment of his poetic powers — more hopeful at 
once, if one may so say, and more assured of himself. 

Meanwhile, soon after his return from his second foreign mis- 
sion, he was enabled to begin a more settled life at home. He had 
acquitted himself to the satisfaction of the Crown, as is shown by 
the grant for life of a daily pitcher of wine, made to him on April 
23rd, 1374, the merry day of the Feast of St. George. It would, of 
course, be a mistake to conclude, from any seeming analogies of 
later times, that this grant, which was received by Chaucer in 
mone3^-value, and which seems finally to have been commuted for 
an annual payment of twenty marks, betokened on the part of the 



24 CHAUCER. 

King a spirit of patronage appropriate to the claims of literary leis- 
ure. How remote such a notion was from the minds of Chaucer's 
employers is proved by the term of the patent by which, in the 
month of June following, he was appointed Comptroller of the Cus- 
toms and Subsidy of wools, skins and tanned hides in the port of 
London. This patent (doubtless according to the usual official 
form) required him to write the rolls of his office with his own 
hand, to be continually present there, and to perform his duties in 
person, and not by deputy. By a warrant of the same month 
Chaucer was granted the pension of ro/. for life already mentioned, 
for services rendered by him and his wife to the Duke and Duchess 
of Lancaster and to the Queen ; by two successive grants of the 
year 1375 he received further pecuniary gratifications of a more or 
less temporary nature ; and he continued to receive his pension 
and allowance for robes as one of the royal esquires. We may, 
therefore, conceive of him as now established in a comfortable as 
well as seemingly secure position. His regular work as a comp- 
troller (of which a few scattered documentary vestiges are pre- 
served) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise 
itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's collector- 
ship of stamps,* though doubtless it must have brought him into 
constant contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have 
suggested to him many a broad descriptive touch. On the other 
hand, it is not necessary to be a poet to feel something of that 
ineffable ennui of official life, which even the self-compensatory 
practice of arriving late at one's desk, but departing from it early, 
can only abate, but not take awa}^ The passage has been often 
quoted in which Chaucer half implies a feeling of the kind, and 
tells how he sought recreation from what Charles Lamb would 
have called his " works " at the Custom House in the reading, as 
we know he did in the writing, of other books :-; — 

"... When thy labour done all is. 
And hasty-made reckonings, 
Instead of rest and newe things 
Thou go'st home to thine house anon, 
And there as dumb as any stone 
Thou sittest at another book." 

The house at home was doubtless that in Aldgate, of which the 
lease to Chaucer, bearing date May, 1374, has been discovered; 
and to this we may fancy Chaucer walking morning and evening 
from the river-side, past the Postern Gate by the Tower. Already, 
however, in 1376, the routine of his occupations appears to have 
been interrupted by his engagement on some secret service under 
Sir John Burley ; and in the following year, and in 1378, he was re- 
peatedly abroad in the service of the Crown. On one of his jour- 
neys in the last-named year he was attached in a subordinate 

* It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should have received, as a reward for his 

[jolitical services as a satirist, an office ahnost identical with Chaucer's- But he held it for 
ittle more than a year. 



CHAUCER. 3:; 

capacity to the embassy sent to negotiate for the marriage with the 
French King Charles V.'s daughter Mary to the young King 
Richard II., who had succeeded to his grandfather in 1377 — one of 
those matrimonial missions which, in tiie days of both Plantagenets 
and Tudors, formed so large a part of the functions of European 
diplomacy, and which not unfrequently, as in this case at least ulti- 
mately, came to nothing. A later journey in May of the same year 
took Chaucer once more to Italy, whither he had been sent with 
Sir Edward Berkeley to treat with Bernardo Visconti, joint lord of 
Milan, and "scourge of Lombardy," and Sir John Hawkwood — 
the former of whom finds a place in that brief mirror of magistrates, 
the Monk's Tale. It was on this occasion that of the two persons 
whom, according to custom, Chaucer appointed to appear for him 
in the Courts during his absence, one was John Gower, whose name 
as that of the second poet of his age is indissolubly linked with 
Chaucer's own. 

So far, the new reign, which had opened amidst doubts and 
difficulties for the country, had to the faithful servant of the dy- 
nasty brought an increase of royal good-will. In 1381 — after the 
suppression of the great rebellion of the villeins — King Richard II. 
had married the princess whose name for a season linked together 
the history of two countries the destinies of which had before that 
age, as they have since, lain far asunder. Yet both Bohemia and 
England, besides the nations which received from the former the 
impulses communicated to it by the latter, have reason to remem- 
ber Queen Anne, the learned and the good ; since to her was 
probably due, in the first instance, the intellectual intercourse be' 
tween her native and her adopted country. There seems every 
reason to believe that it was the approach of this marriage which 
Chaucer celebrated in one of the brightest and most jocund mar- 
riage-poems ever composed by a laureate's hand ; and if this was 
so, lie cannot but have augmented the favour with which he was 
regarded at Court. Wlien, therefore, by May, 1382, his foreign 
journeys had come to an end, we do not wonder to find that, with- 
out being called upon to relinquish his former office, he was ap- 
pointed in addition to the Comptrollership of the Petty Customs in 
the Port of London, of which post he was allowed to execute the 
duties by deputy. In November, 1384, he received permission to 
absent himself from his old comptrollership for a month ; and in 
February, 1385, was allowed to appoint a (permanent) deputy for 
this office also. During the month of October, 1386, he sat in 
Parliament at Westminster as one of the Knights of the Shire for 
Kent, where we may consequently assume him to have possessed 
landed propert}'. His fortunes, therefore, at this period had clearly 
risen to their height ; and naturally enough his commentators are 
anxious to assign to these years the sunniest, as well as some of 
the most elaborate, of his literary productions. It is altogether 
p -obable that the amount of leisure now at Chaucer's command en- 
abled him to carry into execution some of the works for which he 
had gathered materials abroad and at home, and to prepare others. 



56 CHAUCER. 

Inasmuch as it contains the passage cited above, referring to 
Chaucer's official employment, his poem called the House of Fame 
must have been written between 1374 and 1386 (when Chaucer 
quitted office), and probably is to be dated near the latter year. 
Inasmuch as both this poem and T7-oilusand Cressidscc^ mentioned 
in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, they must have 
been written earher than it ; and the dedication of Troilus to Gower 
and Strode very well agrees with the relations known to have ex- 
isted about this time between Chaucer and his brother-poet. Very 
probably all these three works may have been put forth, in more 
or less rapid succession, during this fortunate season of Chaucer's 
life. 

A fortunate season — for in it the prince who, from whatever 
cause, was indisputably the patron of Chaucer and his wife, had, 
notwithstanding his unpopularity among the lower orders, and the 
deep suspicion fostered by hostile whisperings against him in his 
royal nephew's breast, still contrived to hold the first place by the 
throne. Though serious danger had already existed of a conflict 
between the King and his uncle, yet John of Gaunt and his Duchess 
Constance had been graciously dismissed with a ro3^al gift of golden 
crowns, when, in July, 1386, he took his departure for the Conti- 
nent, to busy himself till his return home in November, 1389, with 
the affairs of Castile, and with claims arising out of his disburse- 
ments there. The reasons for Chaucer's attachment to this par- 
ticular patron are probably not far to seek ; on the precise nature 
of the relation between them it is useless to speculate. Before 
Wychf's death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly dissociated him- 
self from the reformer ; and whatever may have been the case in 
his later years, it was certainly not as a follower of his old patron 
that at this date Chaucer could have been considered a Wycliffite. 

Again, this period of Chaucer's life maybe called fortunate, be- 
cause during it he seems to have enjoyed the only congenial friend- 
ships of which any notice remains to us. The poem of Troilus and 
Cressid is, as was just noted, dedicated to " the moral Gower and 
the philosophical Strode." Ralph Strode was a Dominican of 
Jedburgh Abbey, a travelled scholar, whose journeys had carried 
him as far as the Holy Land, and who was celebrated as a poet in 
both the Latin and the English tongue, and as a theologian and 
philosopher. In connexion with speculations concerning Chaucer's 
relations to Wycliffism it is worth noting that Strode, who, after 
his return to England, was appointed to superintend several new 
monasteries, was the author of a series of controversial arguments 
against Wychf. The tradition, according to which he taught one 
of Chaucer's sons, is untrustworthy. \ Of John Gower's life little 
more is known than of Chaucer's ; he appears to have been a Suf- 
folk man, holding manors in that county as well as in Essex, but 
occasionally to have resided in Kent. At the period of which we 
are speaking, he may be supposed, besides his French productions, 
to have already published his Latin Fox C/amanlzs— 3. poem which, 
beginning with an allegorical narrative of Wat Tyler's rebellion, 



CHAUCER. 



57 



passes on to a series of reflexions on the causes of the movement, 
conceived in a spirit of indignation against the corruptions of the 
Church, but not of sympathy with Wychffism. This is no doubt 
the poem which obtained for Govver the epithet "moral " (/. ^,, sen- 
tentious) applied to him by Chaucer, and afterwards by Dunbar, 
Hawes, and Shakspeare. Gqwer 's Vox Clamantis and other Latin 
poems (including one " again sti he astuteness of the Evil One in 
the matter of Lollardry ") are forgotten ; but his English Confessio 
Amantis has retained its right to a place of honour in the history 
of our literature. The most interesting part of this poem, its Pfo- 
loi^iie, has already been cited as of value for our knowledge of the 
poHtical and social condition of its times. It gives expression to 
a conservative tone and temper of mind ; and, like many conserva- 
tive minds, Gower's had adopted, or affected to adopt, the convic- 
tion that the world was coming to an end. The cause of the antici- 
pated catastrophe he found in the division, or absence of concord 
and love, manifest in the condition of things around. The intensity 
of strife visible among the conflicting elements of which the world, 
like the individual human being, is composed, too clearly announced 
the imminent end of all things. Would that a new- Arion might 
arise to make peace where now is hate ; but, alas ! the prevaihng 
confusion is such that God alone may set it right. But the poem 
which follows cannot be said to sustain the interest excited by this 
introduction. Its machinery was obviously suggested by that of 
the Roman de la Rose, though, as Warton has happily phrased it, 
Gower, after a fashion of his own, blends Ovid's Art of Love with 
the Breviary. The poet, wandering about in a forest, while suffer- 
ing under the smart of Cupid's dart, meets Venus, the Goddess of 
Love, who urges him, as one upon the point of death, to make his 
full confession to her clerk or priest, the holy father Genius. This 
confession hereupon takes place by means of question and answer ; 
both penitent and confessor entering at great length into an exami- 
nation of the various sins and weaknesses of human nature, and of 
their remiedies, and illustrating their observations by narratives, 
brief or elaborate, from Holy Writ, sacred legend, ancient historj^, 
and romantic story. Thus Gower's book, as he says at its close, 
stands " between earnest and game," and might be fairly described 
as a Romauni of the Rose, without either the descriptive grace of 
Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full 
of learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not de- 
void of the art of telhng stories. The mind of this author was 
thoroughly didactic in its bent ; for the beauty of nature he has no 
real feeling; and though his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins 
in the month of May, he is (unnecessarily) careful to tell us that 
his object in going forth was not to "sing with the birds." He 
could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old things into new, but there is 
enough in his character as a poet to explain the friendship between 
the pair, of which we hear at the very time when Gower was proba- 
bly preparing his Confessio Amantis for publication. 

They are said afterwards to have become enemies ; but in the 



2 8 CHAUCER. 

absence of any real evidence to that effect, we cannot believe 
Chaucer to have been likely to quarrel with one whom he had cer- 
tainly both trusted and admired. Nor had literary life in England 
already advanced to a stage of development of which, as in the 
Elizabethan and Augustan ages,literary jealousy was an indispens- 
able accompaniment. Chaucer is supposed to have attacked 
Gower in a passage of the Canterbury Tales^ where he incidentally 
declares his dislike (in itself extremely commendable) of a particu- 
lar kind of sensational stories, instancing the subject of one of the 
numerous tales in the Confessio Amajttis. There is, however, no 
reason whatever for supposing Chaucer to have here intended a 
reflection on his brother poet, more especially as iho. Man of Law ^ 
after uttering the censure, relates, though probably not from Gow- 
er, a story on a subject of a different kind likewise treated by him. 
It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower, in a second edition 
of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of Derby (after- 
wards Henry .IV.), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered 
the close of the first edition — both of which weje complimentary to 
Richard II. — he left out, together with its surrounding context, a 
passage conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a " disciple 
and poet of the God of Love." 

In any case there could have been no political difference be- 
tween them, for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House 
of Lancaster, towards whose future head Gower so early contrived 
to assume a correct attitude. To him — a man of substance, with 
landed property in three counties — the rays of immediate court- 
favour were probably of less importance than to Chaucer ; but it is 
not necessity only which makes courtiers of so many of us : some 
are born to the vocation, and Gower strikes one as naturally more 
prudent and cautious — in short, more of a politic personage — than 
Chaucer. He survived him eight years — a blind invalid, in whose 
mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the recol- 
lection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame. 

In a still nearer relationship — on which the works of Chaucer 
that may certainly or probably be assigned to this period throw 
some light — it seems impossible to describe him as having 
been fortunate. Whatever may have been the date and circum- 
stances of his marriage, it seems, at all events in its later years, 
not to have been a happy one. The allusions to Chaucer's 
personal experience of married life in both Troilus and Cressid 
and the House of Fame are not of a kind to be entirely ex- 
plicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of mar- 
riage, which has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and 
which was specially popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean 
de Meung, and complacently corroborating its theories from 
naughty Latin fables, Yr^nchfabliai^x, and Italian novelle. Both 
in Troilus and Cressid and in the House of Fafue the poet's tone, 
when he refers to himself, is generally dolorous ; but while both 
poems contain unmistakeable references to the joylessness of his 
own married life, in the latter he speaks of himself as " suffering 



CHAUCER. 



59 



debonairly " — or, as we should say, putting a good face upon — a 
state "desperate of all bliss." And it is a melancholy though 
half sarcastic glimpse into his domestic privacy which he incident- 
ally, and it must be allowed rather unnecessarily, gives in the 
following passage of the same poem : — 

" ' Awake ! ' to me he said. 
In voice and tone the very same 
That nseth one whom I could name ; 
And with that voice, sooth to say(n) 
My mind returned to me again ; 
For it was goodly said to me ; 
So Vv-as it never wont to be." 

In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it 
M^as not. the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his 
pillow ! Again, the entire tone of the Prologue to the Legend of 
Good Women is not that of a happy lover; although it would be 
pleasant enough, considering that the lady who imposes on the 
poet the penalty of celebrating ^(9^^ women is Alcestis, the type of 
faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only an ayitende 
honorable to the female sex in general, but a token of reconciliation 
to the poet's wife in particular. Even in the joyous Assembly of 
Fowls, a marriage-poem, the same discord already makes itself 
heard ; for it cannot be without meaning that in his dream the poet 
is told by "African " — 

"... Thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess, 
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness ; " 

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much 
of love, he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we 
reluctantly accept the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a 
husband, we must at the same time decHne, because the husband 
was a poet, and one of the most genial of poets, to cast all the 
blame upon the wife, and to write her down a shrew. It is unfor- 
tunate, no doubt, but it is likewise inevitable, that at so great a 
distance of time the rights and wrongs of a conjugal disagreement 
or estrangement cannot with safety be adjusted. Yet again, be- 
cause we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not obliged to blame 
Chaucer. At the same time, it must not be concealed that his 
name occurs in the year 1380 in connexion with a legal process, of 
which the most obvious, though not the only possible, explanation 
is that he had been guilty of a grave infidehty towards his wife. 
Such discoveries as this last we might be excused for wishing un- 
made. 

Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of 
the poems belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one 
fortunate period of Chaucer's life. Of one of these works, how- 
ever, which has had the curious fate to be dated and re-dated by a 
succession of happy conjectures, the last and happiest of all may 



6o CBAUCER, 

be held to have definitively fixed the occasion. This is the 
charming poem called the Assembly of Fowls, or Parliament of 
Birds — a production which seems so English, so fresh from 
nature's own inspiration, so instinct with tlie gaiety of Chaucer's 
own heart, that one is apt to overlook in it the undeniable vestiges 
of foreign influences, both French and Italian. At its close the 
poet confesses that he is always reading, and therefore hopes that 
he may at last read something "so to fare the better." But with 
all this evidence of study the Asseinbly of Fowls is chiefly inter- 
esung as showing how Chaucer had now begun to select as well as 
to assimilate his loans ; how, while he was still moving along well- 
known tracks, his eyes were joyously glancing to the right and the 
left; and how the source of most of his imagery, at all events, he 
already found in the merry England around him, even as he had 
chosen for his subject one of real national interest. 

Anne of Bohemia, daughter of tne great Emperor Charles IV., 
and sister of King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to 
a Bavarian prince and to a Margrave of Meissen, before — after 
negotiations which, according to Froissart, lasted a year — her hand 
was given to the young King Richard II. of England. This suf- 
ficiently explains the general scope of the Assembly of Fowls, an 
allegorical poem written on or about St. Valentine's Day, 1381 — 
eleven months, or nearly a year, after which date the marriage 
took place. On the morning sacred to lovers, the poet (in a 
dream, of course, and this time conducted by the arch-dreamer 
Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the temple of the 
God of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and allego- 
rical. Here he sees the mble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill 
of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as 
by time-honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when every 
fowl comes there to choose her mate." Their huge noise and 
hubbub is reduced to order by Nature, who assigns to each fowl 
its proper place — the birds of prey highest; then those that eat 
according to natural inclination — 

" Worm or thing of which I ':ell no tale ; " 

then those that live by seed ; and the various members of the sev- 
eral classes are indicated with amusing vivacity and point, from 
the royal eagle "that with his sharp look pierceth the sun," and 
"other eagles of a lower kind" downwards. We can only find 
room for a portion of the company : — 

" The spari'ow, Venus' son ; the nightingale 
That clepeth forth the freshe leaves new ; 
The swallow, murd'rer of the bees small, 
That honey make of flowers fresh of hue ; 
The wedded turtle, with his hearte true ; 
The peacock, with his angels' feathers bright, 
The pheasant, scorner of the cock by nigh.. 



CHAUCER, 6 1 

The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind ; 

The popinjay, full of delicacy ; 

The drake, destroyer of his owne kind ; 

The stork, avenger of adultery ; 

The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony ; 

The crows and ravens with their voice of care ; 

And the throstle old, and the frosty fieldfare." 

Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and des» 
ignations, not all of which rest on allusions as easily understood as 
that recalling the goose's exploit on the Capitol ; but the vivacity 
of the whole description speaks for itself. One is reminded of 
Aristophanes' feathered chorus ; but birds are naturally the de- 
light of poets, and were befriended by Dante himself. 

Hereupon the action of the poem opens. A female eagle is 
wooed by three suitors — all eagles ; but among them the first, or 
royal eagle, discourses in the manner most likely to conciliate favour. 
Before the answer is given, a pause furnishes an opportunity to 
the other fowls for delighting in the sound of their own voices, Dame 
Nature proposing that each class of birds shall, through the beak 
of its representative "agitator," express its opinion on the problem 
before the assembly. There is much humour in the readiness of 
the goose to rush in with a ready-made resolution, and in the smart 
reproof administered by the sparrow-hawk amidst the uproar of 
" the gentle fowls all." At last Nature silences the tumult, and 
the lady-eagle delivers her answer, to the effect that she cannot 
make up her mind for a year to come ; but inasmuch as Nature 
has advised her to choose the royal eagle, his is clearly the most 
favourable prospect. Whereupon, after certain fowls had sung a 
roundel, "as was always the usance," the assembly, like some 
human Parliaments, breaks up with shouting ; * and the dreamer 
awakes to resume his reading. 

Very possibly the Assembly of Fowls was at no great interval 
of time after followed or preceded by two poems of far inferior 
interest — the Co?nplaint of Mars (apparently afterwards amalga- 
mated with that of Venus), which is supposed to be sung by a bird 
on St. Valentine's morning, and the fragment Of ,Quee7i Anelida 
a?id false Arcite. There are, however, reasons' which make a less 
early date probable in the case of the latter production, the history 
of the origin and purpose of which can hardly be said as yet to be 
removed out of the region of mere speculation. In any case, 
neither of these poems can be looked upon as preparations, on 
Chaucer's part, for the longer work on which he was to expend so 
much labour; but in a sense this description would apply to the 
translation which, probably before he wrote Troilus and Cressid, 
certainly before he wrote the Prologue to the Legend of Good 
Women, he made of the famous Latin work of Boethius, "the just 
man in prison," on the Consolation of Philosophy. This book was, 

'• Than all the birdis song with sic a schout 
That I annone awoik quhair that I lay." 

Dunbar, The Thrissill and the Rois. 



62 CHA UCER. 

and very justly so, one of the favourite manuals of the Middle 
Ages, and a treasure-liouse of religious wisdom to centuries of 
English writers. " Boice of Consolacioun " is cited in the Romaunt 
of the Rose; and the list of passages imitated by Chaucer from the 
martyr of Catholic orthodoxy and Roman freedom of speech is ex- 
ceedingly long. Among them are the ever-recurring diatribe 
against the fickleness of fortune, and (through the medium of 
Dante) the reflection on the distinction between gentle birth and a 
gentle life. Chaucer's translation was not made at second-hand; 
if not always easy, it is conscientious, and interpolated with numer- 
ous glosses and explanations thought necessary by the translator. 
The metre of T/ie For7ner Lifd he at one time or another turned 
into verse of his own. 

Perhaps the most interesting of the quotations made in Chau- 
cer's poems from Boethius occurs in his Troilus and Cressid, one 
of the' many mediaeval versions of an episode engrafted by the 
lively fancy of an Anglo-Norman ti'oiivh-e upon the deathless, and 
in its literary variations incomparably luxuriant, growth of the 
story of Troy. On Benoit de Sainte-Maure's poem Guido de Col- 
onna founded his Latin-prose romance ; and this again, after being 
reproduced in languages and by writers almost innumerable, served 
Boccaccio as tlie foundation of his poem Filostrato — /. e., the vic- 
tim of love. All these works, together with Chaucer's Troilus and 
Cressid^ with Lydgate's Troy-Book^ with Henryson's Testament of 
Cr-^j-j-z^ (and in a sense even with Shakspeare's drama on the theme 
of Chaucer's poem), may be said to belong to the second cycle of 
modern versions of the tale of Troy divine. Already their earlier 
predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only 
knew by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin ei^itomes, 
■which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour 
of the Trojans — the supposed ancestors of half the nations of 
Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his 
House of Fa77te, regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said 
that Homer" wTote "lies," 

" Feigning in his poetries 
And was to Greekes favourable. 
Therefore held he it but fable." 

But the courtly poets of the romantic age of literature went a step 
iurther, and added a mediceval colouring all their own. One con- 
verts the Sibyl into a nun, and makes her admonish ^neas to tell 
his beads. Another — it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate — intro- 
duces Priam's sons exercising their bodies in tournaments and 
their minds in the glorious play of chess, and causes the memory 
of ^ Hector to be consecrated by the foundation of a chantry of 
priests who are to pray for the repose of his soul. A third finally 
condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken with leprosy, and to 
wander about with cup and clapper, like the unhappy lepers in the 
great cities of the Middle Ages. Everything, in short, is trans- 



CHAUCER. 63 

fused by the spirit of the adapters' own times ; and so far are these 
writers from any weakly sense of anachronism in describing Troy 
as if it were a moated and turreted city of the later Middle Ages, 
that they are only careful now and then to protest their own truth- 
fulness when anything in their narrative seems unlike the days in 
which they write. 

But Chaucer, though his poem is, to start with, only an English 
reproduction of an Italian version of a Latin translation of a French 
poem, and though in most respects it shares the characteristic fea- 
tures of the body of poetic fiction to which it belongs, is far from being 
a mere translator. Apart from several remarkable reminiscences 
introduced by Chaucer from Dante, as well as from the irrepressible 
Roinaunt of the Rose, he has changed his original in points which are 
not mere matters of detail or questions of convenience. In accord- 
ance with the essentially dramatic bent of his own genius, some of 
these changes have reference to the aspect of the characters and the 
conduct of the plot, as well as to the whole spirit of th-e conception 
of the poem. Cressid (who, by the way, is a widow at the outset 
— whether she had children or not Chaucer nowhere found stated, 
and therefore leaves undecided) may at first sight strike the reader 
as a less consistent character in Chaucer than in Boccaccio. But 
there is true art in the way in which, in the English poem, our 
sympathy is first aroused for the heroine, whom, in the end, we 
cannot but condemn. In Boccaccio, Cressid is fair and false — one 
of those fickle creatures with whom Italian literature, and Boccac- 
cio in particular, so largely deal, and whose presentment merely 
repeats to us the old cynical half-truth as to woman's weakness. 
The English poet, though he does not pretend that his heroine 
was " religious " [i. e., a nun to whom earthly love is a sin), endears 
her to us from the first; so much that '• O the pity of it '* seems 
the hardest verdict we can ultimately pass upon her conduct. How, 
then, is the catastrophe of the action, the falling away of Cressid 
from her truth to Troilus, poetically explained ? By an appeal — 
pedantically put, perhaps, and as it were dragged in violently by 
means of a truncated quotation from Boethius — to the fundamental 
difficulty concerning the relations between poor human life and the 
government of the world. This, it must be conceded, is a con- 
siderably deeper problem than the nature of woman. Troilus and 
Cressid, the hero sinned against and the sinning heroine, are the 
victims of Fate. Who shall cast a stone against those who are, 
but like the rest of us, predestined to their deeds and to their doom ; 
since the co-existence of free-will with predestination does not ad- 
mit of proof ? This solution of the conflict may be morally as 
well as theologically unsound; it certainly is aesthetically faulty; 
but it is the reverse of frivolous or commonplace. 

Or let us turn from Cressid, " matchless in beauty," and warm 
with sweet life, but not ignoble even in the season of her weakness, 
to another personage of the poem. In itself the character of 
Pandarus is one of the most revolting which imagination can de- 
vise ; so much so that the name has become proverbial for the most 



64 CHAUCER, 

despicable of human types. With Boccaccio Pandarus is Cressid's 
cousin and Troilus' youthful friend, and there is no intention of 
making him more offensive than are half the confidants of amor- 
ous heroes. But Chaucer sees his dramatic opportunity ; and 
without painting black in black and creating a monster of vice, he 
invents a good-natured and loquacious elderly go-between, full of 
proverbial philosophy and invaluable experience — a genuine light 
comedy character for all times. How admirably. this Pandarus 
practises as well as preaches his art ; using the hospitable Deipho- 
bus and the queenly Helen as unconscious instruments in his in- 
trigue for bringing the lovers together : — 

*" She came .to dinner in her plain intent ; 
But God and Pandar wist what ah this meant." 

Lastly, considering the extreme length of Chaucer's poem, and 
the very simple plot of the story which it tells, one cannot fail to 
admire the skill with which the conduct of its action is managed. 
In Boccaccio the earlier part of the story is treated with brevity, 
while the conclusion, after the catastrophe has occurred and the 
main interest has passed, is long drawn out. Chaucer dwells at 
great length upon the earlier and pleasing portion of the tale, more 
especially on the falling in love of Cressid, which is worked out 
with admirable naturalness. But he comparatively hastens over its 
pitiable end — the fifth and last book of his poem corresponding 
to not less than four cantos of the Filosirato. In Chaucer's hands, 
therefore, the story is a real love-story ; and the. more that we are 
led to rejoice with the lovers in their bliss, the more our compas- 
sion is excited by the lamentable end of so much happiness ; and 
we feel at one with the poet, who, after Hngeringover the happiness 
of which he has in the end to narrate the fall, as it were, unwillingly 
proceeds to accomphsh his task, and bids his readers be wroth with 
the destiny of his heroine rather than with himself. His own heart, 
he says, bleeds and his pen quakes to write what must beiwritten 
of the falsehood of Cressid, which was her doom. 

Chaucer's nature, however tried, was unmistakeably one gifted 
with the blessed power of easy self-recovery. Though it was in a 
melancholy vein that he had begun to write Troilus and Cressid, 
hef had found opportunities enough in the course of the poem for 
giving expression to the fresh vivacity and playful humour which 
are justly reckoned among his chief characteristics. And thus, to- 
wards its close, we are not surprised to find him apparently looking 
forward to a sustained effort of a kind more congenial to himself. 
He sends forth his " little book, his little tragedy," with the prayer 
that, before he dies, God, his Maker, may send him might to 
"make some comedy." If the poem called the House of Fame 
followed upon Troilus and Cressid {S\'^^ order of succession may, 
however, have been the reverse), then, although the poet's own 
mood had little altered, yet he had resolved upon essaying a direc- 
tion which he rightly felt to be suitable to his genius. 



CHAUCER. 65 

The Hous^ of Fame has not been distinctly traced to any one 
foreign source ; but the influence of both Petrarch and Dante, as 
well as that of classical authors, are clearly to be traced in the 
poem. And yet this work, Chaucer's most ambitious attempt in 
poetical allegory, may be described not only as in the main due to 
an original conception, but as representing the results of the wri- 
ter's personal experience. All things considered, it is the produc- 
tion of a man of wonderful reading, and shows that Chaucer's was 
a mind interested in the widest variety of subjects, which drew no 
invidious distinctions, such as we moderns are prone to insist upon, 
between Arts and Science, but (notwithstanding an occasional 
deprecatory modesty) eagerly sought to familiarise itself with the 
achievements of both. In a passage concerning the men of letters 
who had found a place in the House of Fa7ne,h& displays not only 
an acquaintance with the names of several ancient classics, but 
also a keen appreciation — now and then, perhaps, due to instinct — 
of their several characteristics. Elsewhere he shows his interest in 
scientific inquiry by reference to such matters as the theory of 
sound and the Arabic system of numeration ; while the Mentor of 
the poem, the Eagle, openly boasts his powers of clear scientific 
demonstration, in averring that he can speak "lewdly '' (/. e., popu- 
larly) ''to a lewd man." The poem opens with a very fresh and 
lively discussion of the question of dreams in general — a semi-sci- 
entific subject which much occupied Chaucer, and upon which even 
Pandarus and the wedded couple of the Ahms Priesfs Tale expend 
their philosophy. 

Thus, besides giving evidence of considerable information and 
study, the House of Fajne shows Chaucer to have been gifted with 
much natural humour. Among its happy touches are the various 
rewards bestowed by Fame upon the claimants for her favour, in- 
cluding the ready grant of evil fame to those who desire it (a bad 
name, to speak colloquially, is to be had for the asking) ; and the 
wonderful paucity of those who wish their good works to remain 
in obscurity and to be their own reward, but then Chaucer was 
writing in the Middle Ages. And as, pointing in a direction which 
the author of the poem was subsequently to follow out, we may also 
specially notice the company thronging the House of Rumour; ship- 
men and pilgrims, the two most numerous kinds of travellers in 
Chaucer's age, fresh from seaport and sepulchre, with scrips brim- 
ful of unauthenticated intelligence. In short, this poem offers in 
its details much that is characteristic of its author's genius ; while, 
as a whole, its abrupt termination notwithstanding, it leaves the 
impression of completeness. The allegory, simple and clear in 
construction, fulfils the purpose for which it was devised ; the 
conceptions upon which it is based are neither idle, like many of 
those in Chaucer's previous allegories, nor are they so artificial 
and far-fetched as to fatigue instead of stimulating the mind. Pope, 
who reproduced parts of the House of Fa7ne in a loose paraphrase, 
in attempting to improve the construction of Chaucer's work, only 
mutilated it. As it stands, it is clear and digestible ; and how 



66 CHAUCER. 

many allegories, one may take leave to ask, in our own allegory- 
loving literature or in any other, merit the same commendation ? 
For the rest, Pope's own immortal Dunciad, though doubtless more 
immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one 
sense a kind of travesty of the Hozese of Fauze — a House of Infamy. 

In the theme of this poem there was undoubtedly something that 
could hardly fail to humour the half-melancholy mood in which it 
was manifestly written. Are not, the poet could not but ask him- 
self, all things vanity — " as men say, what may ever last ? " Yet 
the subject brought its consolation likewise. Patient labour, such 
as this poem attests, is the surest road to that enduring fame, which 
is "conserved with the shade;" and awakening from his vision, 
Chaucer takes leave of the reader with a resolution alreadv habitual 
to him — to read more and more, instead of resting satisfied with the 
knowledge he has already acquired. And in the last of the longer 
poems which seem assignable to this period of his life, he proves 
that one Latin poet at least — Venus' clerk, whom in the House of 
Fame he beheld standing on a pillar of her own Cyprian metal — 
had been read as well as celebrated by him. 

Of this poem, the fragmentary Legend of good Women^ the /*;'<?- 
iogue possesses a pecuhar biographical as well as hterary interest. 
In his personal feelings on the subject of love and marriage, Chau- 
cer had, when he wrote this Prologue, evidently almost passed even 
beyond the sarcastic stage. And as a poet he was now clearly con- 
scious of being no longer a beginner, no longer a learner only, but 
one whom his age knew, and in whom it tooka critical interest. The 
list including most of his undoubted works, which he here recites, 
shows of itself that those already spoken of in the foregoing pages 
were by this time known to the world, together with two of the 
Canterbtiry Tales, which had either been put forth independently, 
or (as seems much less probable) had formed the first instalment 
of his great work. A further proof of the relatively late date of this 
Prologue occurs in the contingent offer which it makes of the poem 
to "the Queen," who can be no other than Richard Il.'syouno- 
consort Anne. At the very outset we find Chaucer, as it were, re- 
viewing his own literary position — and doing so in the spirit of an 
author who knows very well what v said against him, who knows 
very well what there is in what is said against him, and who yet is 
full of that true self-consciousness which holds to its course — not 
recklessly and ruthlessly, not with a contempt for the feelings and 
judgments of his fellow-creatures, but with a serene trust in the jus- 
tification ensured to every honest endeavour. The principal theme 
of his poems had hitherto been the passion of love, and woman, who 
is the object of the love of man. Had he not, the superfine critics 
of his day may have asked — steeped as they were in the artificiality 
and florid extravagance of chivalry in the days of its decline, and 
habituated to mistranslating earthly passion into the phraseology of 
religious devotion — had he not debased the passion of love, and de- 
famed its object? Had he not begun by translating the wicked sa- 
tire of Jean de Meung, " a heresy against the law " of Love 1 and 



CHAUCER. 67 

had he not, by cynically painting in his Cressid a picture of woman's 
perfidy, encouraged men to be less faithful to women. 

" That be as true as ever was any steel ? " 

In Chaucer's way of meeting this charge, which he emphasises by 
putting it in the mouth of the God of Love himself, it is, to be sure, 
difficult to recognise any very deeply penitent spirit. He mildly 
wards off the reproach, sheltering himself behind his defender, the 
'' lady in green," who afterwards proves to be herself that type of 
womanly and wifely fidelity unto death, the true and brave Alcestis. 
And even in the body of the poem one is struck by a certain per- 
functoriness, not to say flippancy, in the way in. which its moral is 
reproduced. The wrathful invective against the various classical 
followers of Lamech, the maker of tents,* wears no aspect of deep 
moral indignation ; and it is not precisely the voice of a repentant 
sinner which concludes the pathetic story of the betrayal of Phillis 
with the adjuration to ladies in general : — 

" Beware ye women of your subtle foe, 
Since yet this day men may example see ; 
And as in love trust ye no man but me." 

At the same time the poet lends an attentive ear, as genius can 
always afford to do, to a criticism of his shortcomings, and readily 
accepts the sentence pronounced by Alcestis, that he shall write a 
legend of ^(?^^ women, both maidens and also wives, that were 

" True in loving all their lives." 

And thus, with the courage of a good or, at all events, easy 
conscience, he sets about his task which unfortunately — it is con- 
jectured by reason of domestic calamities, probably including the 
death of his wife— remained, or at least has come down to us un- 
finished. We have only nine of the nineteen stories which he 
appears to have intended to present (though, indeed, a manuscript of 
Henry IV.'s reign quotes Chaucer's book of " xxv good women ''). 
It is by no means necessary to suppose that all these nine stories 
were written continuously; maybe, too, Chaucer, with all his virtuous 
intentions, grew tired of' his rather monotonous scheme at a time 

* Lamech, Chaucer teils us in Queen Annelida and the false Arcite, was the 
" First father that began 
The love of two, and was in bigamy." 
This poem seems designed to ilhistrate much the same moral as that enforced by the 
Legend of Good Women— 7^ moral which, by-the-bye. is already foreshadowed towards 
the close of Troilus and Cressid, where Chaucer speaks of 

*' Women that betrayed be 
Through false folk (God give them sorrow, amen !), 
That with their greate wit and subtlety 
Betray vou ; and 'tis this that moveth me 



To speak ; and, in effect, you all I pray : 
Beware of men, and hearken what I say." 



68 CHAUCER, 

when he was beginning to busy himself with stones meant to be 
fitted into the more liberal framework of the Canterbury Tales. 
All these illustrations of female constancy are of classical origin, 
as Chaucer is glad to make known ; and most of them are taken 
from Ovid. But though the thread of the English poet's narratives 
is supplied by such established favourites as the stories of Cleo- 
patra, the Martyr Queen of Egypt; of Thisbe of Babylon, the 
Martyr ; and of Dido, to whom " JEneas was forsworn," yet he by 
no means slavishly adheres to his authorities, but alters or omits 
in accordance with the design of his book. Thus, for instance, we 
read of Medea's desertion by Jason, but hear nothing of her as the 
murderess of her children ; wliile, on the other hand, the tragedy 
of Dido is enhanced by pathetic additions not to be found in Virgil. 
Modern taste may dislike the way in which this poem mixes up the 
terms and ideas of Christian martyrology with classical myths, and 
as " the Legend of the Saints of Cupid " assumes the character of 
a kind of calendar of women canonised by reason of their faithful- 
ness to earthly love. But obviously this is a method of treatment 
belonging to an age, not to a single poem or poet. Chaucer's ar- 
tistic judgment in the selection and arrangement of his themes, the 
wonderful vivacity and true pathos with which he turns upon 
Tarquin or Jason as if they had personally offended him, and his 
genuine flow of feeling not on\y for but with his unhappy heroines, 
add a new charm to the old familiar faces. Proof is thus furnished, 
if any proof were needed, that no story interesting in itself is too 
old to admit of being told again by a poet ; in Chaucer's version 
Ovid loses something in polish, but nothing in pathos ; and the 
breezy freshness of nature seems to be blowing through tales which 
became the delight of a nation's, as they have been that of many a 
man's, youth. 

A single passage must suffice to illustrate the style of the 
Lege7id of Good Wome7i j and it shall be the lament of Ariadne, 
the concluding passage of the story which is the typical tale of 
desertion, though not, as it remains in Chaucer, of desertion uncon- 
soled. It will be seen how far the English poet's vivacity is from 
being extinguished by the pathos of the situation described by 
him. 

*' Right in the dawening awaketh she, 

And gropeth in the bed, and found right nought. 
' Alas,' quoth she, ' that ever I was wrought ! 

I am betrayed ! ' and her hair she rent, 

And to the strande barefoot fast she went, 

And criede : ' Theseus, mine hearte sweet! 

Where be ye, that I may not with you meet } 

And mighte thus by beastes been y-slain ! ' 

The hollow rockes answered her again. 

No man she sawe ; and yet shone the moon, 

And high upon a rock she wente soon, 

And saw his barge sailing in the sea. 

Cold waxed her heart, and right thus saide she; 
* Meeker than ye I find the beastes wild 1 ' 



CHA UCEK. 69 

(Hath he not sin that he her thus beguiled ?) 

She cried, ' O turn again for ruth and sin, 

Thy barge hath not all thy meinie in.' 

Her kerchief on a pole slicked she, 

Askance, that he should it well y-see, 

And should remember that she was behind, 

And turn agaiu, and on the strand her find. 

But all for naught ; his way he is y-gone, 

And down she fell aswoone on a stone ; 

And up she rose, and kissed, in all her care, ' 

The steppes of his feet remaining there ; 

And then unto her bed she speaketh so : 

' Thou bed,' quoth she, ' that hath received two, 
Thou shalt answe'r for two, and not for one ; 
Where is the greater part away y-gone .'' 
Alas, what shall I wretched wight become } 
For though so be no help shall hither come. 
Home to my country dare I not for dread, ' 

I can myselfe in this case not rede.' 
Why should I tell more of her complaining? 
It is so long it were a heavy thing. 
In her Epistle Naso telleth all. 
But shortly to the ende tell I shall. 
The goddes have her holpen for pity, 
And in the sign of Taurus men may see 
The stones of her crown all shining clear. 
I will no further speak of this matter. 
But thus these false lovers can beguile 
Their true love ; the devil quite him his while ! " 

Manifestly, then, in this period of his life — if a chronology 
which is in a great measure conjectural may be accepted — Chaucer 
had been a busy worker, and his pen had covered many a page 
with the results of his rapid productivity. Perhaps his Words 
nnto his own Scrivener^ which we may fairly date about this time, 
were rather too hard on " Adam." Authors are often hard on 
persons who have to read their handiwork professionally ; but, in 
the 'nterest of posterity, poets may be permitted an execration or 
two against whoever changes their words as well as against who- 
soever moves their bones : — 

'* Adam Scrivener, if ever it thee befall 
Boece or Troilus to write anew, 
Under thy long locks may'st thou have the scall, 
If thou my writing copy not more true ! 
So oft a day I must thy work renew. 
It to correct and eke to rub and scrape ; 
And all is through thy negligence and rape. " 

How far the manuscript of the Canterbury Tales had already 
progressed is uncertain ; the Prologue to the Legend of Good 
Wonien mentions the Love of Palamon a7id Arcite — an earlier 
version of the Knighfs Tale, if not identical with it — and a Life of 



70 



CHAUCER. 



Saint Cecilia which is preserved, apparently without alteration, in 
the Second Null's Tale. Possibly other stones had been already 
added to these, and the Prologue written— but this is more than can 
be asserted with safety. Who shall say whether, if the stream of 
prosperity had continued to flow, on which the bark of Chaucer's for- 
tunes had for some years been borne along, he might not have found 
leisure and impulse sufficient for completing his masterpiece, or, at 
all events, for advancing it near to completion ? That his powers 
declined with his years, is a conjecture which it would be difficult 
to support by satisfactory evidence ; though it seems natural enough 
to assume that he wrote the best of his- Canterbury Tales in his 
best days. Troubled times we know to have been in store for him. 
The reverse in his fortunes may perhaps fail to call forth in us the 
sympathy which we feel for Milton in his old age doing battle 
against a Philistine reaction, or for Spenser, overwhelmed with 
calamities at the end of a life full of bitter disappointment. But 
at least we may look upon it with the respectful pity which we en- 
tertain for Ben Jonson groaning in the midst of his hte-rary honours 
under that dura rerurn necessitas, which is rarely more a matter 
of indifference to poets than it is to other men. 

In 1386, as already noted, Chaucer, while continuing to hold 
both his offices at the Customs, had taken his seat in Parliament 
as one of the knights of the shire of Kent. He had attained to this 
honour during the absence in Spain of his patron, the Duke of 
Lancaster, though probably he had been elected in the interest of 
that pnnce. But John of Gaunt's influence was inevitably reduced 
to nothing during his absence, and no doubt King Richard now 
hoped to be a free agent. But he very speedily found that the 
hand of his younger uncle, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester,, was 
heavier upon him than that of the elder. The Parliament of which 
Chaucer was a member was the assembly which boldly confronted 
the autocratical tendencies of Richard II., and after overthrowing 
the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, forced upon 
the King a Council controlling the administration of affairs. Con- 
cerning the acts of this Council, of which Gloucester was the lead- 
ing member, little or nothing is known, except that in financial 
matters it attempted, after the manner of new brooms, to sweep 
clean. Soon the attention of Gloucester and his following was 
occupied by subjects more absorbing than a branch of reform fated 
to be treated fitfully. In this instance the new administration had 
as usual demanded its victims — and among their number was 
Chaucer ; for it can hardly be a mere coincidence that by the be- 
ginning of December in this year, 1386, Chaucer had lost one, and 
by the middle of the same month the other, of his comptrollerships. 
At the same time, it would be presumptuously unfair to conclude 
that misconduct of any kind on his part had been the reason of his 
removal. The explanation usually given is that he fell as an ad- 
herent of John of Gaunt : perhaps a safer way of putting the matter 
would be to say that John of Gaunt was no longer in England to 
protect him. Inasmuch as even reforming Governments are oc- 



CHAUCER 



71 



casionally as anxious about men as they are about measures, 
Chaucer's posts may have been wanted for nominees of the Duke 
of Gloucester and his Council— such as it is probably no injustice to 
Masters Adam Yerdely and Henry Gisors (who respectively suc- 
ceeded Chaucer in his two offices) to suppose them to have been. 
Moreover, it is just possible that Chaucer was the reverse of a 
persona grata to Gloucester's faction on account of the Comptrol- 
ler's previous official connexion with Sir Nicholas Brembre, who, 
besides being hated in the city, had been accused of seeking to 
compass the deaths of the Duke and of some of his adherents. In 
any case, it is noticeable that four months /;<?/"^r<? the return to Eng- 
land of the Duke of Lancaster — i. e., in July, 1389— Chaucer was 
appointed Clerk of the King's Works at Westminster, the Tower, 
and a large nu.mber of other royal manors or tenements, including 
(from 1390, at all events) St. George's Chapel, Windsor. In this 
office he was not ill-paid, receiving two shillings a day in money, 
and very possibly perquisites in addition, besides being allowed to 
appoint a deputy. Inasmuch as, in the summer of the year 1389, 
King Richard had assumed the reins of government in person, 
while the ascendency of Gloucester was drawing to a close, we may 
conclude the King to have been personally desirous to provide for 
a faithful and attached servant of his house, for whom he had had 
reason to feel a personal liking. It would be specially pleasing, 
were we able to connect with Chaucer's restoration to official em- 
ployment the high-minded Queen Anne, whose impending betrothal 
he had probably celebrated in one poem, and whose patronage he 
had claimed for another. 

The Clerkship of the King's Works, to which Chaucer was ap- 
pointed, seems to have been but a temporary office ; or at all events 
he only held it for rather less than two years, during part of which 
he performed its duties by deputy. Already, however, before his 
appointment to this post, he had certainly become involved in dif- 
ficulties ; for in May, 1388, we find his pensions, at his own re- 
quest, assigned to another person (John Scalby) — a statement im- 
plying that he had raised money on them which he could only pay 
by making over the pensions themselves. Very possibly, too, he 
had, before his dismissal from his comptrollerships, been subjected 
to an enquiry which, if it did not touch his honour, at all events 
gave rise to very natural apprehensions on the part of himself 
and his friends. There is, accordingly, much probability in the 
conjecture which ascribes to this season of peril and pressure the 
composition of the following justly famous stanzas, entitled Good 
Counsel of Chattcer: — • 

" Flee from the press, and dwell with soothfastness ; 
Suffice thee thy good, though it be small ; 
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness : 
Press hath envy, and wealth is blinded all. 
Savour no move than thee behove shall ; 
Do well th5'self that other folk canst rede ; 
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread. 



^2 CHAUCER. 

" Paine thee not each crooked to redress 
In trust of her * that turneth as a ball. 
Greate rest stands in little business. 
Beware also to spurn against a nail. 
Strive not as doth a pitcher with a waL. 
Deeme thyself that deemest others' deed; 
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread. 

*' That thee is sent receive in buxomness; 
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall. 
Here is no home, here is but wilderness. 
Forth, pilgrime ! forth, beast, out of thy stall I 
Look up on high, and thanke God of all. 
"Wavie thy lust, and let thy ghost thee lead, 
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread." 

Misfortunes, it is said, never come alone ; and whatever view 
may be taken as to the nature of the relations between Chaucer 
and his wife, her de^th cannot have left him untouched. From 
the absence of any record as to the payment of her pension after 
June, 1387, this event is presumed to have taken place in the latter 
half of that year. More than this cannot safely be conjectured ; 
but it remains possible that the Legend of Good Women and its 
Prologue formed a peace-offering to one whom Chaucer niay have 
loved again after he had lost her, though without thinking of her 
as of his " late departed saint." Philippa Chaucer had left be- 
hind her a son of the name of Lewis ; and it is pleasing to find the 
widower in the year 1391 (the year in which he lost his Clerkship 
of the Works) attending to the boy's education, and supplying him 
with the intellectual "bread and milk " suitable for his tender age 
in the shape of a popular treatise on a subject which has at all 
times excited the intelligent curiosity of the young. The treatise 
Oil the Astrolabe, after describing the instrument itself, and show- 
ing how to work it, proceeded, or was intended to proceed, to fulfil 
the purposes of a general astronomical manual ; but, like other 
and more important works of its author, it has come down to us in 
an uncompleted, or at all events incomplete, condition. What 
there is of it was, as a matter of course, not original — popular 
scientific books rarely are. The little treatise, however, possesses 
a double interest for the student of Chaucer. In the first place, 
it shows explicitly, what several passages imply, that while he was 
to a certain extent fond of astronomical study (as to his capacity 
for which he clearly does injustice to himself in the House of Fame') ^ 
his good sense and his piety alike revolted against extravagant 
astrological speculations. He certainly does not wish to go as far 
as the honest carpenter in the Miller'^s Tale, who glories in his in- 
credulity of aught besides his credo, and who yet is afterwards be- 
fooled by the very impostor of whose astrological pursuits he had 
reprehended the impiety. " Men," he says, •' should know nothing 
©f that which is private to God. Yea, blessed be alway a simple 



CHAUCER. 73 

man who knows nothing but only his belief." In his little work 
On the Astroable Chaucer speaks with calm reasonableness of su- 
perstitions in which his spirit has no faith, and pleads guilty to 
ignorance of the useless knowledge with which they are surrounded. 
But the other, and perhaps the chief value, to us of this treatise 
lies in the fact that of Chaucer in an intimate personal relation it 
contains the only picture in which it is impossible to suspect any 
false or exaggerated colouring. For here we have him writing to 
his "little Lewis " with fatherly satisfaction in the ability displayed 
by the boy " to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions," 
and telling how, after making a present to the child of "a suffi- 
cient astrolabe as for our own horizon, composed after the latitude 
of Oxford," he has further resolved to explain to him a certain 
number of conclusions connected with the purposes of the instru- 
ment. This he has made up his mind to do in a forcible as well 
as simple way ; for he has shrewdly divined a secret, now and 
then overlooked by those wlio condense sciences for babes, that 
children need to be taught a few things not only clearly but fully 
—repetition being in more senses than one "the mother of 
Ltudies : " — 

" Now will I pray meekly every discreet person that readeth or 
hearetk this little treatise, to hold my rude inditing excused, and my su- 
perfluity of words, for two causes. The first cause is: that curious indit- 
ing iiud hard sentences are full heavy at once for such a child to learn. 
And the second cause is this: that truly it seems better to me to write unto 
a child twice a good sentence than to forget it once." 

Unluckily we know nothing further of Lewis — not even whether, as 
has been surmised, he died before he had been able to turn to 
lucrative account his calculating powers, after the fashion of his 
apocryphal brother Thomas or otherwise. 

1 hough by the latter part of the year 1391 Chaucer had lost 
his Clerkship of the Works, certain payments (possibly of arrears) 
seem afterwards to have been made to him in connexion with the 
office. A very disagreeable incident of his tenure of it had been 
a double robbery from his person of official money, to the very 
serious extent of twenty pounds. The perpetrators of the crime 
were a notorious gang of highwaymen, by whom Chaucer was, in 
September, 1390, "apparently on the same day, beset both at West- 
minster and near to "the foul Oak" at Hatcham, in Surrey. A 
few months aftei'wards he was discharged by writ from repayment 
of the loss to the Crown. His experiences during the t'nree years 
following are unknov/n ; but in 1394 (when things were fairly quiet 
in Enirland) he was granted an annual pension of twenty pounds 
by the King. Tlds pension, of wliicli several subsequent notices 
occur, seems at limes to liave been paid tardily or in small instal- 
ments, and also to have h.een frequently anticipated by Cliaucer in 
the shaoc of loans of small sums. Further evidence of his straits 
is to be found in his having, in tlic year 1398, obtained letters of 
protection against arrest, making him safe for two years. The 



74 CHAUCER. 

grant of a tun of wine in October of the same year is the last 
favour known to have been extended to Chaucer by King Richard 
II. Probably no English sovereign has been more diversely esti- 
mated, both by his contemporaries and by posterity, than this ill- 
fated prince, in the records of whose career many passages beto- 
kening high spirit strangely contrast v/ith the impotence of its close. 
It will at least be remembered in his favour that he was a patron ©f 
the arts ; and that after Froissart had been present at his christen- 
ing, he received, when on the threshold of manhood, the homage of 
Gower, and on the eve of his downfall showed most seasonable 
kindness to a poet far greater than either of these. It seems 
scarcely justifiable to assign to any particular point of time the 
Ballade sent to King Richard by Chaucer ; but its manifest inten- 
tion was to apprise 'the King of the' poet's sympathy with his strug- 
gle against the opponents of the royal policy, which was a thoroughly 
autocratical one. Considering the nature of the relations between 
the pair, nothing could be more unlikely than that Chaucer should 
have taken upon himself to exhort his sovereign and patron to 
steadfastness of political conduct. And in truth, though the loyal 
tone of this address is (as already observed) unmistakeable enough, 
there is little difficulty in accounting for the mixture of common- 
place reflexions and of admonitions to the King, to persist in a 
spirited domestic policy. He is to 

"Dread God, do law, love truth and worthiness," 

and wed his people — not himself — "again to steadfastness." 
However, even a quasi-political poem of this description, whatever 
element of implied flattery it may contain, offers pleasanter reading 
than those least attractive of all occasional poems, of v/hich the 
burden is a cry for money. The Eiivoy to Scogan has been di- 
versely dated and diversely interpreted. The reference in these 
lines to a deluge of pestilence clearlv means, not a pestilence pro- 
duced by heavy rains, but heavy rains which might be expected to 
produce a pestilence. The primary purpose of the epistle admits 
of no doubt, though it is only revealed in the postscript. After 
bantering his friend on account of his faint-heartedness in love — 

'Because thy lady saw not thy distress, 
Therefore thou gavest her up at Michaelmas — " 

Chaucer ends by entreating him to further his claims upon the 
royal munificence. Of this friend, Henry Scogan, a tradition 
repeated by Ben Jonson averred that he was a fine gentleman and 
Master of Arts of Henry IV.'s time, who was regarded and 
rewarded for his Court " disguisings " and "writings in ballad- 
royal." He is, therefore, appropriately apostrophised by Chaucer 
as kneeling 

" . . . At the streames head 
Of grace, of all honour and worthiness," 



CHAUCJiR. 



?5 



and reminded that his friend is at the other end of the current. 
The weariness of tone, natural under the circumstances, obscures 
whatever humour tiie poem possesses. 

Very possibly the lines to Scogan were written not ])efore, but 
immediately after, the accession of Henry TV, Tn that case they 
belong to about the same date as the well-known and very plan- 
spoken Complaint of Lhaucer to ///j /^7i;r-$-d?, addressed by him to 
the new Sovereign without loss of time, if not indeed, as it would 
be hardly uncharitable to suppose, prepared beforehand. Even 
in this Coinpiauit (the term was a technical one for an elegiac 
piece, and was so used by Spenser) there is a certain frank geniality 
of tone, the natural accompaniment of an easy conscience, which 
goes some way to redeem the nature of the subject. Still, the 
theme remains one which only an exceptionally skilful treatment 
can make sufficiently pathetic or perfectly comic. The lines had 
the desired effect : for within four days after his accession — i.e.^ 
on October 3rd, 1399 — the "conqueror of Brut's Albion," other- 
wise King Henry IV., doubled Chaucer's pension of twenty marks, 
so that, continuing as he did to enjoy the annuity of twenty pounds 
granted him by King Kichard, he was now once more in comfort- 
able circumstances. The best proof of these lies in the fact that 
very speedily — on Christmas Eve, 1399 — Chaucer, probably in a 
rather sanguine mood, covenanted for the lease for fifty-three years 
of a house in the garden of the chapel of St. Mary at Westminster. 
And here, in comfort and in peace, as there seems every reason to 
believe, he died before another year, and with it the century, 
had quite run out — on October 25111,1400. 

Our fancy may readily picture to itself the last days of GeofiVey 
Chaucer, and the ray of autumn sunshine which gilded his reverend 
head before it was bowed in death. His old patron's more for- 
tunate son, whose earlier chivalrous days we are apt to overlook 
in thinking of him as a politic king and the sagacious founder of a 
dynasty, cannot have been indifferent to the welfare of a subject 
for whose needs he had provided with so prompt a liberality. In 
the vicinity of a throne the smiles of royalty are wont to be con- 
tagious — and probably many a courtier thought well to seek the 
company of one who, so far as we know, had never forfeited the 
good-will of any patron or the attachment of any friend. We 
may, too, imagine him visited by associates who loved and hon- 
oured the poet as well as the man — by Gower, blind, or nearly so, 
if tradition speak the truth, and who, having "long had sickness 
upon hand," seems, unlike Chaucer, to have been ministered to 
in his old age by a housewife whom he had taken to himself in 
contradiction of principles preached by both the poets ; and by 
" Bukton," converted, perchance, by means of Chaucer's gift to 
him of the Wife of BatJi's Tale, to a resolution of prepetual 
bachelorhood, but otherwise, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "dim to 
us." Besides these, if he was still among the living, the philo- 
sophical Strode in his Dominican habit, on a visit to London from 
one of his monasteries; or — more probably — the youthful Lydgate. 



^6 cnAucPJL 

not yet a Benedictine monk, but pausing, on his return from his 
■ travels in clivers lands, to sit awhile, as it were, at the feet of the 
master in whose poetic example lie took pride ; the courtly Scogan ; 
and Occleve, already learned, who was to cherish the memory of 
Chaucer's outward features as well as of his fj'uitful intellect': all 
tliese may in his closing days have gathered around their friend ; 
and perhaps one or the other may have been present to close the 
watciiful eves for ever. 

But there was yet another company with which, in these last 
years, and perhaps in these last days of his life, Chaucer had in- 
tercourse, of which he can rarely have lost ^ight, and which sven 
in solitude he must have had constantly with him. This company 
has since been well known to 2;enerations and centuries of English- 
men. Its members head that goodly procession of figures which 
have been familiar to our fathers as live-long friends, which are 
the same to us, and will be to our children after us — the procession 
of the nation's favourites among the characters created by our 
great dramatists and novelists, the eternal types of human nature 
which nothing can efface from, our imagination. Or is there less 
reality about the Knight in his short cassock and old-fashioned 
armour and the Wife of Bath in hat and wimple, than — for in- 
stance — about Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman ? Can we 
not hear Madavie Eglantine lisping her " Stratford-atte-Bowe " 
French as if she were a personage in a comedy Dy Congreve or 
Sheridan? Ls not the Siwimoner, with his "fire-red cherubim's 
face," a worthy companion for Lieutenant Bardolph himself? 
And have not the humble Parson and his Brother the Ploughman 
that irresistible pathos which Dickens could find in the simple and 
the poor ? All these figures, with those of their fellow-pilgrims, 
are to us living men and women ; and in their midst the poet who 
created them lives, as he has painted himself among the company, 
not less faithlully than Occleve depicted him from memory after 
death. 

How long Chaucer had been engaged upon the Canterbury 
Tales it is impossible to decide. No process is more hazardous 
than that of distributing a poet's works among the several periods 
of his life according to divisions of species — placing his tragedies 
or serious stories in one season, liis comedies or h'ghter tales hi 
another, and so forth. Chaucer no more admits of such treatment 
than Shakspeare ; noi', because there happens to be in iiis case little 
actual evidence by which to control or contradict it, are we justified 
in subjecting him to it. All we know is that he left his great work 
a fragment, and that we have no mention in any of his other poems 
of more than three of the Tales— two, as already noticed, being 
mentioned in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, written 
at a time when they had perhaps not yet assumed the form in 
which they are preserved, while to. the third (the Wife of Bath) 
reference is made in the Envoi to Buktoji, tlie date of which is 
quite uncertain. Atthe same time, the labour which was expended 
upon the Canterbury 7 ales by their author manifestly obliges us 



CHAUCER. 77. 

to conclude that their composition occupied several years, with in- 
evitable interruptions ; while the gaicly and brightness of many of 
the stories, and the exuberant humour and exquisite pathos of 
others, as well as the masterly effectiveness of the Prologue^ make 
it almost certain that these parts of the work were written when 
Chaucer was not only capable of doing his best, but also in a situ- 
ation wiiich admitted of his doing it. The supposition is, there- 
fore, a very probable one, that the main period of their composi- 
tion may have extended over the last eleven or twelve years of his 
life, and have begun about the time when he was again placed 
above want by his appointment to the Clerkship of the Royal 
Works. 

Again, it is virtually certain that the poem of the Canterbury 
Tales yfcis left in an unfinished and partially unconnected condition, 
and it is altogether uncertain whether Chaucer had finally deter- 
mined upon maintaining or modifying the scheme originally indi- 
cated by him in the Prologue. There can, accordingly, be no 
necessity for working out a scheme into which everything that he 
has left belonging to the Canterbury Tales may most easily and ap- 
propriately fit. Yet the labour is by no means lost of such inquir- 
ies as those which have, with singular zeal, been prosecuted con- 
cerning the several problems that have to be solved before such a 
scheme can be completed. Without a review of the evidence it 
would, however, be preposterous to pronounce on the proper an- 
swer to be given to the questions : what were the number of tales 
and that of tellers ultimately designed by Chaucer ; what was the 
order in wliich he intended the Tales actually written by him to 
stand ; and what was the plan of the journey of his pilgrims, as to 
the locaHties of its stages and as to the time occupied by it — 
whether one day for the fifty-six miles from London to Canterbury 
(which is by no means impossible), or two days (which seems 
more likely), or four. The route of the pilgrimage must have been 
one in parts of which it is pleasant even now to dally, when the 
sweet spring flowers are in bloom which Mr. Boughton has painted 
for lovers of the poetry of English landscape. 

There are one or two other points which should not be over- 
looked in considering the Canterbury Tales as a whole. It has 
sometimes been assumed as a matter of course that the plan of 
the work was borrowed from Boccaccio. If this means that Chau- 
cer owed to the Decamerone the idea of including a number of 
stories in the framework of a single narrative, it implies too much. 
For this notion, a familiar one in the East, had long been known 
to Western Europe by the numerous versions of the terribly in- 
genious story of the Seven Wise Masters (in the progress of which 
the unexpected never happens), as well as by similar collections of 
the same kind. And the special connexion of this device with a 
company of pilgrims might, as has been well remarked, have been 
suggested to Chaucer by an English book certainly within his ken, 
the Vision concerning Piers Plowman, where, in the " fair field 
full o£ folk," are assembled, among others, " pilgrims and palmers 



78 CHAUCER. 

who went forth on their way " to St. James of Compostella and to 
saints at Rome " with many wise tales'''' — (" and had leave to lie 
all their life after"). But even had Chaucer owed the idea of his 
plan to Boccaccio, he would not thereby have incurred a heavy 
debt to the Italian novelist. There is nothing really dramatic in 
the schemes of the Decamerone^ or of the numerous imitations 
which it called forth, from the French Heptameron and the Nea- 
politan Pentamerone down to the German Fhantasiis. It is un- 
necessary to come nearer to our own times ; for the author of the 
Earthly Paradise follows Chaucer in endeavouring at least to give 
a framework of real action to his collection of poetic tales. There 
is no organic connexion between the powerful narrative of the 
Plague opening Boccaccio's book, and the stories, chiefly of love 
and its adventures, which follow ; all that Boccaccio did was to 
preface an interesting series of tales by a more interesting 
chapter of history, and then to bind the tales themselves to- 
gether lightly and naturally in days, like rows of pearls in a 
collar. But while in the Decamerone the framework, in its rela- 
tion to the stories, is of little or no significance, in the Canter- 
bury Tales it forms one of the most valuable organic elements 
in the whole work. One test of the distinction is this : what 
reader of the Decamerone connects any of the novels compos- 
ing it with the personality of the particular narrator, or even cares 
to remember the grouping of the stories as illustrations of fortunate 
or unfortunate, adventurous or illicit, passion ? The charm of 
Boccaccio's book, apart fi-om the independent merits of the Intro- 
duction, lies in the admirable skill and unflagging vivacity with 
which the "novels" themselves are told. The scheme of the 
Canterbtiry Tales, on the other hand, possesses some genuinely 
dramatic elements. If the entire form, at all events in its extant 
condition, can scarcely be said to have a plot, it at least has an ex- 
position unsurpassed by that of any comedy, ancient or modern; 
it has. the possibility of a growth of action and interest; and, which 
is of far more importance, it has a variety of characters which mu- 
tually both relieve and supplement one another. With how sure 
an instinct, by the way, Chaucer has anticipated that unwritten law 
of the modern drama according to which low comedy characters 
always appear in couples! Thus the Afiller Tind the Reeve are a 
noble pair running in parallel lines, though in contrary directions ; 
so are the Cook and the Manciple, and again and more especially 
the Friar and the Siuninojicr. Thus at least the germ of a comedy 
exists in the plan of the Canterbury Tales. No comedy could be 
formed out of the mere circumstance of a company of ladies and 
gentlemen sitting down in a country-house to tell an unlimited 
number of stories on a succession of topics ; but a comedy could 
be written with the purpose of showing how a wide variety of na- 
tional types will present themselves, when brought into nvitual 
contact by an occasion peculiarly fitted to call forth their individual 
rather than their common characteristics. 

For not only are we at the opening of the Canterbury Talei 



CHAUCER. 



79 



placed in the very heart and centre of English life ; but the poet 
contrives to find for what may be called his action a background, 
which seems to itself to suggest the most serious emotions and 
the most humorous associations. And this without anything 
grotesque in the collection, such as is involved in the notion 
of men telling anecdotes at r. funeral, or forgetting a pesti- 
lence over love-stories. Chaucer's dra?natis persona are a company 
of pilgrims, whom at first we find assembled in a hostelry in South- 
wark, and whom we afterwards accompany on their journey to Can- 
terbury. The hostelry is that Tabard inn which, though it changed 
its name, and no doubt much of its actual structure, long remained, 
both in its general appearance, and perhaps in part of its actual 
self, a genuine relic of mediaeval London. There, till within a very 
few years from the present date, might still be had a draught of 
that London ale of which Chaucer's Cook was so thorough a con- 
noisseur j and there within the big courtyard, surrounded by a 
gallery very probably a copy of its predecessor, was ample room 
for 

"... Well nine and twenty in a company 
Of sundry folk," 



bury. The goal of his ride has its religious, its national, one 
might even say its political aspect ; but the journey itself has an 
importance of its own. A journey is generally one of the best of 
opportunities for bringing out the distinctive points in the characters 
of travellers ; and we are accustomed to say that no two men can 
long travel in one another's company unless their friendship is 
equal to the severest of tests. At home men live mostly among 
colleagues and comrades ; on a journey they are placed in contin- 
ual contrast with men of different pursuits and different habits of 
life. The shipman away from his ship, the monk away from his 
cloister, the scholar away from his books, become interesting in- 
stead of remaining commonplace, because the contrasts become 
marked which exist between them. Moreover, men undertake 
journeys for divers purposes, and a pilgrimage in Chaucer's day 
united a motley group of chance companions in search of different 
ends at the same goal. One goes to pray, the other seeks profit; 
the third distraction, the fourth pleasure. To some the road is 
everything ; to others, its terminus. All this vanity lay in the 
mere choice of Chaucer's framework ; there was, accordingly, some- 
thing of genius in the thought itself; and even an inferior work- 
manship "could hardly have left a description of a Canterbury 
pilgrimage unproductive of a wild variety of dramatic effects. 

But Chaucer's workmanship was as admirable as his selection 
of his framework was felicitous. He has executed only part of his 
scheme, according to which each pilgrim was to tell two tales both 
going and coming, and the best narrator, the laureate of this merry 
company, was to be rewarded by a supper at the common expense 
on their return to their starting-place. Thus the design was, not 



8o 



CHAUCER. 



merely to string together a number of poetical tales by an easy 
thread, but to give a real unity and completeness to the whole 
poem. ' All the tales told by all the pilgrims were to be connected 
too-ether by links ; the reader was to take an interest in the move- 
ment and progress of the journey to and fro ; and the poem was 
to have a middle as well as a beginning and an end— the beginning 
being the inimitable Prologue 2iS it now stands ; the middle the his- 
tory^f the pilgrims' doings at Canterbury; and the close their re- 
turn and farewell celebration at the Tabard inn. Though Chaucer 
carried out only about a fourth part of this plan, yet we can see, as 
clearly as if the whole poem lay before us in a completed form, 
that its most salient feature was intended to lie in the variety of its 
characters. 

Each of these characters is distinctly marked out in itself, while 
at the same time it is designed as the type of a class. This very 
obvious criticism, of course, most readily admits of being illus- 
trated by the Prologue — a gallery of ^^«r^-por traits which many 
master-hands have 'essayed to reproduce with pen or with pencil. 
Indeed, one lover of Chaucer sought to do so with both— poor 
gifted Blake, whose descriptive text of his picture of the Canterbury 
Pilgrims Charles Lamb, with the loving exaggeration in v/hich he 
was at times fond of indulging, pronounced the finest criticism on 
Chaucer's poem he had ever read. But it should be likewise noticed 
that the character of each pilgrim is kept up through the poem, 
both incidentally in tlie connecting passages between tale and tale, 
and in the manner in which the tales themselves are introduced 
and told. The connecting passages are full of dramatic vivacity ; 
in these the Host, Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient 
choragus ; but the other pilgrims are not silent, and in the Man- 
cipe''s Prologue the Cook enacts a bit of downriglit farce for the 
amusement of the company and of stray inliabitants of '' Bob-up-and- 
down." He is, however, homoeopathically cured of the effects of 
his drunkenness, so that the Host feels justified in offering up a 
thanksgiving to Bacchus for his powers of conciliation. The Ma7i 
of Law'' s Prologue is an argument; the Wife of BatJi's the cease- 
less clatter of an indomitable tongue. The sturdy pyanklin cor- 
rects himself v/hen deviating into circumlocution : 

" Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue, 
For th' horizon had reft the sun of light 
(This is as much to say as : it was night)." 

The Miller " tells his churhsh tale in his manner," of which 
manner the less said the better ; while the Reeve'' s Tale, Chaucer 
even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern 
undergraduate a vulgar, ungrammatical phraseology, probably de- 
signedly, since the poet was himself a " Southern man." The 
Pardoner is exuberant in his sample-eloquence ; the Doctor oj 
Physic is gravely and sententiously moral — 



CHAUCER. 8 1 

" ... A proper man, 
And like a prelate, by Saint Runyan, 

says the Host. Most sustained of all, though he tells no tale, is, 
from the nature of the case, the character oi Harry Bailly, the host 
of the Tabard, himself — who, whatever resemblance he may bear 
to his actual original, is the ancestor of a long line of descendants, 
including mine Host of the Garter in the Merty Wives of Windsor. 
He is a thorough worldling, to whom anything smacking of the 
precisian in morals is as offensive as anything of a Romantic tone 
in literature ; he smells a Lollard without fail, and turns up his nose 
at an old-fashioned ballad or a string of tragic instances as out of 
date or tedious. In short, he speaks his mind and that of other 
more timid people at the same time, and is one of those sinners 
whom everybody both likes and respects. "I advise," says the 
Pardo7ier, with polite impudence (when inviting the company to 
become purchasers of the holy wares which he has for sale), that 

'' . . . Our host, he shall begin 
For he is most enveloped in sin.'' 

He is thus both an admirable picture in himself and an admirable 
foil to those characters which are most unhke him — above all, to 
the Parson and the Clerk of Oxford., the representatives of religion 
and learning. 

As to the Tales themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant 
their style and tone to be above all things popular. This is one of 
the causes accounting for the favour shown to the work — a favour 
attested, so far as earher times are concerned, by the vast number 
of manuscripts existing of it. The Host is, so to speak, charged 
with the constant injunction of this cardinal principle of popularity 
as to both theme and style. "Tell us," he coolly demands of the 
most learned and sedate of all his fellow-travellers, 

". ,. . Some merry thing of adventures ; 
Your termes, your colours, and your figures. 
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite 
High style, as when that men to kinges write ; 
Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray, 
That we may understande that ye say." 

And the Clerk follows the spirit of the injunction both by omitting, 
as impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a 
great deal of valuable, but not in its connexion interestino;. geo- 
graphical information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he 
calls the " unrestful matter " of his story. Even the Squire^ thoug^h, 
after the manner of young men. far more than his elders addicted 
to the grand style, and accordingly specially praised for his elo- 
quence by the simple Franklin, prefers to reduce to its plain mean- 
ing the courtly speech of the Knight of the Brazen Steed. In con- 
nexion with what was said above, it is observable that each of the 
6 



82 CHA UCER. 

Tales in subject suits its narrator. Not by chance is the ail-but- 
Quixotic romance of Palainon and Arcite, taken by Chaucer from 
Boccaccio's Teseide, related by the Knight j not by chance does 
the Clerk, following Petrarch's Latin version of a story related by 
the same author, tell the even more improbable, but, in the plain- 
ness of its moral, infinitely more f ructuous, tale of patient Griseldis 
How well the Second Nun is fitted with a legend which carries us 
back a few centuries into the atmosphere of Hrosvitha's comedies 
and suggests with the utmost verisimilitude the nature of a nun's 
ucubrations on the subject of marriage. It is impossible to go 
through the whole hst ot the Tales; but all may be ?ruly said to be 
in keepingwith the characters and manners (often equally indiffer- 
ent) ot their tellers-down to that of the Nun^s Priest which, brim- 
ful of humour as it is, has just the mild naughtiness about it which 
comes so drolly from a spiritual director in his worldlier hour. 

Not a single one of these Tales can with any show of reason be 
ascribed to Cliaucer's own invention. French literature— chiefly, 
though not solely, tliat of /«^//^7/:r— doubtless supplied the larger 
share of his materials; but that here also his debts to Italian litera- 
ture, and to Boccaccio in particular, are considerable, seems hardly 
to admit of denial. But while Chaucer freely borrowed from foreign 
models, he had long passed beyond the stage of translating without 
assimilating. It would be rash to assume that where he altered he 
invariably improved. His was not the unerring eye which, like 
Shakspeare's in his dramatic transfusions of Plutarch, missed no 
particle of the gold mingled with the baser metal, but rejected the 
dross with sovereign certainty. In dealing with Italian originals 
more especially, he sometimes altered for the worse, and sometimes 
for the better ; but he was never a mere slavish translator. So in 
the Knighfs Tale he may be held in some points to have deviated 
disadvantageously from his original ; but, on the other hand, in the 
Clerk's Tale he inserts a passage on the fidelity of women, and 
another on the instability of the multitude, besides adding a touch 
of nature irresistibly pathetic in the exclamation of the faithful 
wife, tried beyond her power of concealing the emotion within her : 

" O gracious God ! how gentle and how kind 
Ye seemed by your speech and your visage 
The day that'maked was our marriage." 

So also in the Mafi of Law'' s Tale, which is taken from the French, 
he increases the vivacity of the narrative by a considerable number 
of apostrophes in his own favourite manner, besides pleasing the 
general reader by divers general reflexions of his own inditing. 
Almost necessarily, the literary form and the self-consistency of his 
originals lose under such treatment. But his dramatic sense, on 
which, perhaps, his commentators have not always sufficiently 
dwelt, is rarely, if ever, at fault. Two illustrations of this gift in 
Chaucer must suffice, which shall be chosen in two quarters where 
be has worked with materials of the most widely different kind. 



CHAUCER. 83 

Many readers must have compared with Dante's original (in canto 
xxxiii. of the Inferno) Chaucer's version in the Monk's Taleoi'd^o. 
story of Ugolino. Chaucer, while he necessarily omits the ghastly 
introduction, expands the pathetic picture of the sufferings of the 
father and his sons in their dungeon, and closes, far more briefly 
and effectively than Dante, with a touch of the most refined 
pathos ; — 

"DE HUGILINO COMITE PIS^. 

*' Of Hugolin of Pisa the languor 
There may no tongue telle for pity. 
But little out of Pisa stands a tower, 
In whiche tower in prison put was he ; 
And with him be his little children three. 
The eldest scarcely five years was of age ; 
Alas ! fortune ! it was great cruelty 
Such birds as these to put in such a cage. 

*' Condemned he was to die in that prison, 
For Royer, which that bishop was of Pise, 
Had on him made a false suggestion, 
Through which the people gan on him arise, 
And put him in prison in such a wise. 
As ye have heard, and meat and drink he had 
So little that it hardly might suffice, 
And therewithal it was full poor and bad. 

*' And on a day befell that in that hour 
When that his meat was wont to be y-brought, 
The gaoler shut the doores of that tower. 
He heard it well, although he saw it not ; 
And in his heart anon there fell a thought 
That they his death by hunger did devise. 
' Alas ! ' quoth he — * alas ! that I was wrought 1 ' 
Therewith the teares felle from his eyes. 

" His youngest son, that three years was of age, 
Unto him said: ' Father, why do ye weep ? 
When will the gaoler bring us our pottage ? 
Is there no morsel bread that ye do keep ? 
I am so hungry that I cannot sleep. 
Now woulde God that I might sleep for ever ! 
Then should not hunger in my belly creep. 
There is no thing save bread that I would liever.* 

" Thus day by day this child began to cry, 
Till in his father's lap adown he lay, 
And saide : ' Farewell, father, I must die ! * 
And kissed his father, and died the same day. 
The woeful father saw that dead he lay, 
And his two arms for woe began to bite, 
And said : ' Fortune, alas and well-awnv ! 
For all my woe I blame thy treacherous spite. 



$4 CHA UCER. 

" His children weened that it for hunger was, 
That he his armes gnawed, and not for woe. 
And saide ; " Father, do not so, alas! 
But rather eat the flesh upon us two. 
Our flesh thou gavest us, our iiesh thou take us fro, 
And eat enough.' Right thus they to him cried; 
And after that, within a day or two, 
They laid them in his lap adown and died." 

The father, in despair, likewise died of hunger ; and such was the 
end of the mighty Earl of Pisa, whose tragedy whosoever desires 
to hear at greater length may read it as told by the great poet of 
Italy hight Dante. 

The other instance is that of The Pardoner's Tale, which 
would appear to have been based on 2^ fabliau now lost, though the 
substance of it is preserved in an Itahan novel, and in one or two 
other versions. For the purpose of noticing how Chaucer ar- 
ranges as well as tells a story, the following attempt at a condensed 
prose Tendering of his narrative may be acceptable : — 

Once upon a time in Flanders there was a company of young 
men, who gave themselves up to every kind of dissipation and de- 
bauchery—haunting the taverns where dancing and dicing con- 
tinues day and night, eating and drinking, and serving the devil in 
his own temple by their outrageous life of luxury. It was horrible 
~) hear their oaths, how they tore to pieces our blessed Lord's body, 
; if they thought the Jews had not rent Him enough ; and each 
. j-ughed at the sin of the others, and all were alike immersed in 
gluttony and wantonness. 

And so one morning it befell that three of these rioters were 
sitting over their drink in a tavern, long before the bell had rung 
for nine-o'clock prayers. And as they sat, they heard a bell clink- 
ing before a corpse that was being carried to the grave. So one 
of them bade his servant-lad go and ask what was the name of the 
dead man ; but the boy said that he knew it already, and that it was 
the name of an old companion of his master's. As he had been 
sitting drunk on a bench, tliere had come a privy thief, whom men 
called Death, and who slew all the people in this country ; and he 
had smitten the drunken man's heart in two with his spear, and 
had then gone on his way without any more words. This Death 
had slain a thousand during the present pestilence ; and the boy 
thought it worth warning his master to beware of such an adversary, 
and to be ready to meet him at any time. "So my mother taught 
me ; I say no more." " Marry," said the kee])er of the tavern ; 
"the child tells the truth : this Death has slain all the inhabitants 
of a great village not far from here ; I think that there must be the 
place where he dwells." Then the rioter swore with some of his 
big oaths that he at least was not afraid of this Death, and that he 
would seek him out wherever he dwelt. And at his instance his 
two boon-companions joined with him in a vow that before night- 
fall they would slay the false traitor Death, who was the slayer of 
so many; and the vow they swore was one of closest fellowship be* 



CHAUCER. 8 2 

tween them— to live and die for one another as if they had been 
brethren born. And so they went forth in their drunken fury to- 
wards the village of which the taverner had spoken, with terrible 
execrations on their lips that "Death should be dead, if they might 
catch him." 

They had not gone quite half a mile when, at a sti'e between 
two fields, they came upon a poor old man, who meekly greeted 
them with a " God save you, sirs." Eut the proudest of the three 
rioters answered him roughly, asking him why^he kept himself all 
wrapped up except his face, and how so old a fellow as he had 
managed to keep alive so long? And the old man looked him 
straight in the face and replied, " Because in no town or village, 
though I journey as far as the Indies, can I find a man willino- to 
exchange his youth for my age ; and therefore I must keep \\ so 
long as God wills it so. Death, alas ! will not have my hfe, and so 
I wander about like a restless fugitive, and early and late I knock 
on the ground, which is my mother's gate, with my staff, and say, 
' Dear mother, let me in ! behold how I waste away ! Alas ! when 
shall my bones be at rest.? Mother, gladly will I give you my 
chest containing all my worldly gear in return for a shroud to wrap 
me in.' But she refuses me that grace, and that is why my face is 
pale and withered. But you, sirs, are uncourteous to speak rudely 
to an inoffensive old man, when Holy Writ bids you reverence 
grey hairs. Therefore, never again give offence to an old man, if 
you wish men to be courteous to you in your age, should you live 
so long. And so God be with you ; I must go whither I have to 
go." But the second rioter prevented him, and swore he should 
not depart so lightly. " Thou spakest just now of that traitor 
Death, who slays all our friends in this country. As thou art his 
spy, hear me swear that, unless thou tellest where he is, thou shalt 
die ; for thou art in his plot to slay us young men, thou false 
thief!" Then the old man told them that if they were so desirous 
of finding Death, they had but to turn up a winding path to which he 
pointed, and there they would find him they sought in a grove un- 
der an oak-tree, where the old man had just left him ; "he will not 
try to hide himself for all your boasting. And so may God the 
Redeemer save you and amend you ! " And when he had spoken 
itll the three rioters ran till they came to the tree. But what they 
iound there was a treasure of golden florins — nearly seven bushels 
of them, as they thought. Then they no longer sought after 
Death, but sat down all three by the shining gold. And the 
youngest of them spoke first, and declared that Fortune had given 
this treasure to them, so that they might spend the rest of their 
lives in mirth and jollity. The question was how to take this 
money — which clearly belonged to some one else — safely to the 
house of one of the three companions. It must be done by night; 
so let them draw lots, and let him on whom the lot fell run to the 
town to fetch bread and wine, while the other two guarded the treas- 
ure carefully till the night came, when they might agree w^hither to 
transDort it. 



86 CHAUCER. 

The lot fell on the youngest, who forthwith went his way to the 
town. Then one of those who remained with the treasure said to 
the other : " Thou knowest well that thou art my sworn brother, 
and I will tell thee something to thy advantage. Our companion 
is gone, and here is a great quantity of gold to be divided among 
us1:hree. But say, if I could manage so that the gold is divided 
between us two, shall I not do thee a friend's turn ? " And 
when the other failed to understand him, he made him promise 
secrecy, and disclosed his plan. " Two are stronger than one. 
When he sits down, arise as if thou wouldest sport with him; and 
while thou art struggling with him as in play, I will rive him 
through both his sides ; and look thou do the same with thy dag- 
ger. After which, my dear friend, we will divide all the gold be- 
tween you and me, and then we may satisfy all our desires and 
play at dice to our hearts' content." 

'Meanwhile the youngest rioter, as he went up to the town, 
revolved in his heart the beauty of the bright new liorins, and said 
unto himself : " If only I could have all this gold to myself alone, 
there is no man on earth who would live so merrily as I." And 
at last the Devil put it into his relentless heart to buy poison, in 
order with it to kill his two companions. And straightway he went 
on into the town to an apothecary, and besought him to sell him 
some poison for destroying some rats which infested his house, 
and a polecat which, he said, had made away with his capons. 
And the apothecary said : " Thou shalt have something of which 
(so may God save my soul !) no creature in all the world could 
swallow a single grain without losing his life thereby — and that in 
less time than thou wouldest take to walk a mile in." So the 
miscreant shut up his poison in a box, and then he went into the 
next street and borrowed three large bottles, into two of which he 
poured his poison, while the third he kept clean to hold drink for 
himself; for he meant to work hard all the night to carry away the 
gold. So he filled his three bottles with wine, and then went back 
to his companions under the tree. 

What need to make a long discourse of what followed ? As 
they had plotted their comrade's death, so they slew him, and that 
at once. And when they had done this, the one who had coun- 
selled the deed said, "Now let us sit and drink and make merry, 
and then we will bury his body." And it happened to him by 
chance to take one of the bottles which contained the poison; and 
he drank, and gave drink of it to his fellow ; and thus they both 
speedily died. 

The plot of this story is, as observed, not Chaucer's. But how 
carefully, how artistically, the narrative is elaborated, incident by 
incident, and point by point ! How well every effort is prepared, 
and how well every turn of the story is explained ! Nothing is 
superfluous, but everything is arranged with care, dov/n to the cir- 
cumstances of the bottles being bought, for safety's sake, in the 
next street to the apothecary's, and of two out of the three bottles 



CHAUCER. 87 

being filled with poison, which is at once a proceeding natural in 
itselt, and increases the chances against the two rioters when they 
are left to choose for themselves. This it is to be a good story- 
teller. But of a different order is the change introduced by 
Chaucer into his original, where the old hermit— who, of course, is 
Death himself — is rieeing from Death. Chaucer's Old Man is 
seeking Death, but seeking him in vain — like the Wandering Jew 
of the legend. This it is to be a poet. 

Of course it is always necessary to be cautioys before asserting 
any apparent addition ol Chaucer's to be his own invention. Thus, 
in the Merchant's Tale, the very naughty plot of which is anything 
but original, it is impossible to say whether such is the case witli 
the humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo,* 
vr with the fantastic machinery in which f^luto and Proserpine 
anticipate the part played by Oberon and Titania \n A Midsummer 
Night's Dream. On the other hand, Chaucer is capable of using 
goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never intended 
in their original employment. Puck himself must have guided the 
audacious hand which could turn over the leaves of so respected a 
Father of the Church as St. Jerome, in order to derive from his 
treatise 0?i Perpetual Virgi7iity materials for the discourse on 
matrimony delivered, with illustrations essentially her own, by the 
Wife of Bath. 

Two only among these Tales are in prose — a vehicle of expres- 
sion, on the whole, strange to the polite literature of the pre- 
Renascence ages — but not both for the same reason. The first 
of these Tales is told by the poet himself, after a stop has been 
unceremoniously put upon his recital of the Ballad of Sir Thopas 
by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward 
burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre* 
of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's 
days find its opportunities for satire, though it is goins" rather far 
to see in Sir Thopas a predecessor of Don Quixote. T!<e Tale of 
Meliboeus is probablv an English version of a French translation 
of Albert of Brescia's famous Book of Consolation and Counsel, 
which comprehends in a slio:ht narrative framework a long discus- 
sion between the unfortunate Meliboeus, whom the wrongs and suf- 
ferinofs inflict upon him and his have broug^ht to the verge of 
despair, and his wise helpmate, Dame Prudence. By means of a 
Ions: aro^umentation proi)ped up by quotations (not invariably 
assio^ned with conscientious accuracy to their actual source) from 
"The Book," Seneca. " TulHus," and other authors, she at last 
persuades him not onlv to reconcile himself to his enemies, but to 
fors:ive them, even as he hopes to be forgiven. And thus the Tale 
well bears out the truth Impressed upon Meliboeus by the follow- 
ing ingeniously combined quotation : — 

* " Placebo " seems to havp b^i^n a current term to exDr^ss the character or the ways 
ot " the too deferential man." " Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that sing aye 
Plareho." — Parson'' s Tah. 

* Dunbar's burlesque ballao of Si? Thomas Normy is in the same stanza. 



88 CHAUCER. 

And there said once a clerk in two verses : What is better than gold ? 
Jasper. And what is better than jasper ? Wisdom. And what is better 
than wisdom t Woman. And what is better than woman .'' No thing. 

Certainly, Chaucer gave proof of consummate tact and taste, as ' 
well as of an unaffected personal modesty, in assigning to himself 
as one of the company of pilgrims, instead of a tale bringing him 
into competition with the creatures of his own invention, after his 
mocking ballad has served its turn, nothing more ambitious than a 
version of a popular discourse— half narrative, half homily— in 
prose. But a question of far greater difficultv and moment arises 
with regard to the other prose piece included among the Canter- 
bury Tales. Of these the so-called Parson's Tale is the last in 
order of succession. Is it to be looked upon as an integral part 
of the collection ; and, if so, what general and what personal sig- 
nificance should be attached to it ? 

As it stands, the long tractate or sermon (partly adapted from 
a popular French religious manual), which bears the name of the 
Parson's Tale, is, if not unfinished, at least internally incomplete. 
It lacks symmetry, and fails entirely to make good the argument or 
scheme of divisions with which the sermon begins, as conscien- 
tiously as one of Barrow's. Accordingly, an attempt has been 
made to show that what we have is something different from the 
"■ meditation " which Chaucer originally put into his Parson's mouth. 
But, while w^e may stand in respectful awe of the German daring 
which, whether the matter in hand be a few pages of Chaucer, a 
Book of Homer, or a chapter of the Old Testament, is fully pre- 
pared to show which parts of each are mutilated, which interpolated, 
and which transposed, we may safely content ourselves, in the pres- 
ent instance, with considering the preliminary question. A prwi'i, 
is there sufficient reason for supposing any transpositions, inter- 
polations, and mutilations to have been introduced into the Parson's 
Tale ? The question is full of interest ; for while, on the one hand, 
the character of the Parson in the Prologue has been frequently 
interpreted as evidence of svmpathv on Chaucer's part with Wyc- 
liffism, on the other hand the ^Parsons' Tale, in its extant form, goes 
far to disprove the supposition that its author was a Wychffite. 
_> This, then, seems 'the appropriate place for briefly reviewmg 
'ttie vexed question — /^^j Chaucer a Wycliffitef Apart from the 
character of the Parson and from the Parson's Tale, what is the 
nature of our evidence on the subject ? In the first place, nothing 
could be clearer than that Chaucer w^as a very free-spoken critic of 
the life of the clergy— more especially of the Regular clergy— of 
his times. In this character he comes before us from his transla- 
tion of the Roman de la Rose to the Parson's Tale itself, where 
he inveighs with significant earnestness against self-indulgence on 
the part of those who are Religious, or have "entered into Orders, 
as sub-deacon, or deacon, or priest, or hospitallers.". In the Cafi- 
terbury Tales, above all, his attacks upon the Friars run nearly the 
whole gamut of satire, stopping short, perhaps, before the note of 



CHAUCER. 89 

high moral indignation. Moreover, as has been seen, his long 
connexion with John of Gaunt is a well-established fact ; and it has 
thence been concluded that Chaucer fully shared the opinions and 
tendencies represented by his patron. In the supposition that 
Chaucer approved of the countenance for a long lime shown by 
John of Gaunt to Wyclif there is nothing improbable ; neither, 
however, is there anything improbable in this other supposition, 
that, when the Duke of Lancaster openly washed his hands of tiie 
heretical tenets to the utterance of which Wyclif had advanced, 
Chaucer, together with the large majority of Englishmen, held 
with the politic duke rather than with the still unflinching Reformer. 
So long as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to 
ecclesiastical pretensions on the one liand, and of an attempt to 
revive religious sentiment on the other, half the country or more 
was Wycliffite, and Chaucer no doubt with the rest. But it would 
require positive evidence to justify the belief that from this feeling 
Chaucer ever passed to sympathy with Lollardry, in the vague but 
sufficiently intelligible sense attaching to that term in the latter 
part of Richard the Second's reign. Richard II. himself, whose 
patronage of Chaucer is certain, in the end attempted rigorously 
to suppress Lollardry ; and Henry IV., the politic Jolin of Gaunt's 
yet more politic son, to whom Chaucer owed the prosperity enjoyed 
by him in the last year of his life, became a persecutor almost as 
soon as he became a king. 

Though, then, from the whole tone, of his mind, Chaucer could 
not but sympatliise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination 
— though, as a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn 
ability for penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find 
subjects for endless blame and satire in the members of those 
Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's academical ally had 
recognised the most formidable obstacles to the spread of pure re- 
ligion — yet all this would not justify us in regarding him as person- 
ally a Wycliffite. Indeed, we might as well at once borrow the 
phraseology of a recent respectable critic, and set down Dan Chau- 
cer as a Puritan ! The policy of his patron tallied with the view 
which a fresh practical mind such as Chaucer's would naturally be 
disposed to take of the influence of monks and friars, or at least 
of those monks and friars whose vices and foibles were specially 
prominent in his eyes. There are various reasons why men op- 
pose established institutions in the season of their decay ; but a 
fourteenth-century satirist of the monks, or even of the clergy at 
large, was not necessarily a Lollard, any more than a nineteenth- 
century objector to doctors' drugs is necessarily a homoeopathist. 

But, it is argued by some, Chaucer has not only assailed the 
false ; he has likewise extolled the true. He has painted both sides 
of the contrast. On the one side are the Monk, the Friar, and the 
rest of their fellows ; on the other is the Poor Parson of a Town 
— a portrait, if not of Wychf himself, at all events of a Wycliffite 
priest ; and in the Tale or sermon put in the Parson's mouth are 
recognisable beneath the accumulations of interested editors some 



go 



CHA UCER. 



of the characteristic marks of Wycliffism. Who is not acquainted 
with the exquisite portrait in question ? — 

'* A good man was there of religion. 

And was a poore Parson of a town. 

But rich he was of holy thought and work. 

He was also a learned man, a cievk 

That Christes Gospel truly woulde preach; 

And his parishioners devoutly teach. 

Benign he was, and wondrous diligent, 

And in adversity full patient. 

And such he was y-proved ofte sithes. 

Full loth he was to curse men for his tithes ; 

But rather would he give, without doubt, 

Unto his poor parishioners about 

Of his off'ring and eke of his substance. 

He could in little wealth have sufifisancc. 

Wide was his parish, houses far asunder, 

Yet failed he not for either rain or thunder 

In sickness nor mischance to visit all 

The furthest in his parish, great and small, 

Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff. 

This noble ensample to his sheep he gave, 

That first he wrought, and afterwards he taught | 

Out of the Gospel he those wordes caught ; 

And this figure he added eke thereto, 

That ' if gold ruste, what shall iron do .?' 

For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust, 

No wonder is it if a layman rust ; 

And shame it is, if that a priest take keep, 

A foul shepherd to see and a clean sheep ; 

Well ought a priest ensample for to give 

By his cleanness, how that his sheep should lire. 

He put not out his benefice on hire, 

And left his sheep encumbered in the mire, 

And ran to London unto Sainte Paul's, 

To seek himself a chantery for souls. 

Or maintenance with a brotherhood to hold ; 

But dwelt at home, and kepte well his fold, 

So that the wolf ne'er made it to miscarry; 

He was a shepherd and no mercenary. 

And though he holy were, and virtuous, 

He was to sinful man not despitous, 

And of his speech nor difficult nor digne, 

But in his teaching discreet and benign. 

For to draw folk to heaven by fairness, 

By good ensample, this was his business : 

But were there any person obstinate, 

What so he were, of high or low estate, 

Him would he sharply snub at once. Than this 

A better priest, I trow, there nowhere is. 

He waited for no pomp and reverence. 

Nor made himself a spiced conscience ; 

But Christes lore and His Apostles' twelve 
-'He taught, but first he followed it himself." 



CHAUCER. gi 

The most striking features in this portrait are undoubtedly those 
which are characteristics of the good and humble working clergy- 
man of all times ; and some of these, accordingly, Goldsmith could 
appropriately borrow for his gentle poetic sketch of his parson- 
brother in " Sweet Auburn." But there are likewise points in the 
sketch which may be fairly described as specially distinctive of 
Wyclif's Simple Priests — though, as should be pointed out, these 
Priests could not themselves be designated parsons of towns. 
Among the latter features are the specially evangelical source of the 
Parson'' s learning and teaching; and his outward appearance — the 
wandering, staff in hand, which was specially noted in an archiepis- 
copal diatribe against these novel ministers of the people. Yet it 
seems unnecessary to conclude anything beyond this : that the 
feature which Chaucer desired above all to mark and insist upon 
in his Parson, was the poverty and humility which in him contrasted 
with the luxurious self-indulgence of the Monk, and the blatant 
insolence of the Pardoner. From this point of view it is obvious 
why the Parson is made brother to the Plotighma7i j for, in draw- 
ing the latter, Chaucer cannot have forgotten 'that other Ploughman 
whom Langland's poem had identified with Him for whose sake 
Chaucer's poor workman laboured for his poor neighbours, with the 
readiness always shown by the best of his class. Nor need this 
recognition of the dignity of the lowly surprise us in Chaucer, who 
had both sense of justice and sense of humour enough not to flatter 
one class at the expense of the rest, and who elsewhere (in the 
Manciple's Tale) very forcibly puts the truth that what in a great 
man is called a coiip d'etat is called by a much simpler name in a 
humbler fellow-sinner. 

But though, in the Parson of a Town, Chaucer may not have 
wished to paint a Wyclififite priest — still less a Lollard, under which 
designation so many varieties of malcontents, in addition to the 
followers of Wychf, were popularly included — yet his eyes and ears 
were open ; and he knew well enough what the world and its chil- 
dren are at a^l times apt to call those who are not ashamed of their 
rehgion, as well as those who make too conscious a profession of 
it. The world called them Lollards at the close of the fourteenth 
century, and it called them Puritans at the close of the sixteenth, 
and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the 
vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and pur- 
veyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires 
and town wits of Cowper's, hke their successors after them, were 
not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less 
abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry 
Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from 
the Parson, the jovial Host incontinently " smells a Lollard in the 
wind," and predicts (with a further flow of expletives) that there is 
a sermon to follow. Whereupon the Shipjna?i protests not less 
characteristically : — 

** * Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,' 
Saide the Shipman ; ' here shall he not preach : 



92 CHAUCER. 

He shall no gospel here explain or teach. 
We all believe in the great God,' quoth he ; 
* He woulde sowe some difficulty, 
Or springe cockle in our cleane corn.' " * 

After each of the pilgrims except the Parson has told a tale (so 
that obviously Chaucer designed one of the divisions of his work to 
close with the Parson'' s), he is again called upon by the Host. Here- 
upon appealing to the undoubtedly evangelical and, it might without 
straining be said, Wycliffite authority of Timothy, he promises as 
his contribution a " merry tale in prose," which proves to consist 
of a moral discourse. In its extant form the Parson'' s Tale con- 
tains, by the side of much that might suitably have come from a 
Wycliffite teacher, much of a directly opposite nature. For not 
only is the necessity of certain sacramental usages to which Wyclif 
strongly objected insisted upon, but the spoliation of Church prop- 
erty is unctuously inveighed against as a species of one of the 
cardinal sins. No enquiry could satisfactorily establish how much 
of this was taken over or introduced into the Parson's Tale by 
Chaucer himself. But one would fain at least claim for him a 
passage in perfect harmony with the character drawn (:>ii\\t Parson 
in the Prologue — a passage (already cited in part in the opening 
section of the present essay) where the poet advocates the cause 
of the poor in words which, simple as they are, deserve to be 
quoted side by side with that immortal character itself. The con- 
cluding lines may therefore be cited here : — 

" Think also that of the same seed of which churls spring, of the same 
seed spring lords; as well may the churl be saved as the lord. Wherefore 
I counsel thee, do just so with thy churl as thou wouldest thy lord did 
with thee, if thou wert in his plight. A very sinful man is a churl as 
towards sin. I counsel thee certainly, thou lord, that thou work in such 
wise with thy churls that they rather love thee than dread thee. I know 
well, where there is degree above degree, it is reasonable that men should 
do their duty where it is due ; but of a certainty, extortions, and despite 
of our underlings, are damnable." 

In sum, \\\Q Parson's Tale cannot, any more than the character 
of the Parson in the Prologue., be interpreted as proving Chaucer 
to have been a Wycliffite. But the one as well as the other proves 
him to have perceived much of what was noblest in the WyclifSte 
movement, and much of what was ignoblest in the reception with 
which it met at the hands of worldlings — before, with the aid of the 
State, the Church finally succeeded in crushing it, to all appearance, 
out of existence. 

The Parson's Tale contains a few vigorous touches, in addition 
to the fine passage quoted, which make it difficult to deny that 
Chaucer's hand was concerned in it. The inconsistency between 
the religious learning ascribed to the Parson and a passage in the 
Tale, where the author leaves certain things to be settled by di» 

* The nickname Lollards was erroneously derived from lo.j.a (tares.) 



vines, will not be held of much account. The most probable con- 
jecture seems, therefore, to be that the discourse has come down 
to us in a mutilated form. This ?nay be due to the Tale having 
remained unfinished at the time of Chaucer's death ; in which case 
it would form last words of no unfitting kind. As for the actual 
last words of the Canterbiay Tales — the so-called Prayer of Chau- 
cer — it would be unbearable to have to accept them as genuine. 
For in these the poet, while praying for the forgiveness of sins, is 
made specially to entreat the Divine pardon for his "translations 
and inditing in worldly vanities," which he '' revokes in his retrac- 
tions." These include, besides the Book of the Leo (doubtless a 
translation or adaptation from Machault) and many other books 
which the writer forgets, and " many a song and many a lecherous 
lay," all the principal poetical works of Chaucer (with the excep- 
tion of the Ro7naunt of the Rose) discussed in this essay. On the 
other hand, he offers thanks for having had the grace given him to 
compose his translation of Bcelhius and other moral and devo- 
tional works. There is, to be sure, no actual evidence to decide 
in either way tho question as to the genuineness of this Prayer^ 
which is entirely one of internal probability. Those who will may 
believe that the monks, who were the landlords of Chaucer's house 
at Westminster, had in one way or the other obtained a controlling 
mfiuence over his mind. Stranger things than this have happened ; 
but one prefers to believe that the poet of the Canterbury Tales 
remained master of himself to the last. He had written much 
which a dying man might regret; hut it would he sad to have to 
think that "because of humility," he bore false witness at the last 
against an immortal part of himself — his poetic genius. 



94 



CHAUCER. 



CHAPTER III. 

CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY. 

Thus, then, Chaucer had passed away — whether in good or in 
evil odour with the powerful interest with which John of Gaunt's 
son had entered into his unwritten concordate, after all, matters 
but little now. He is no dim shadow to us, even in his outward 
presence ; for we possess sufficient materials from which to picture 
to ourselves with good assurance what manner of man he was. 
Occleve painted from memory, on the margin of one of his own 
works, a portrait of his " worthy master," over against a passage 
in which, after praying the Blessed Virgin to intercede for the 
eternal happiness of one who had written so much in her honour, 
he proceeds as follows : — 

" Althougli his life be quenched, the resemblance 
Of him hath in me so fresh liveliness, 
That to put other men in re'membrance 
Of his person I have here his likeness 
Made, to this end in very soothfastness, 
That they that have of him lost thought and mind 
May by the painting here again him find." 

In this portrait, in which the experienced eye of Sir Harris Nicolas 
sees " incomparably the best portrait of Chaucer yet discovered," 
he appears as an elderly rather than aged man, clad in dark gown 
and hood — the latter of the fashion so familiar to us from this very 
picture, and from the well-known one of Chaucer's last patron, 
King Henry IV. His attitude in this likeness is that of a quiet 
talker, with downcast eyes, but sufficiently erect bearing of body. 
One arm is extended, and seems to be gently pointing some ob- 
servation which has just issued from the poet's lips. The other 
holds a rosary, which may be significant of the piety attributed to 
Chaucer by Occleve, or may be a mere ordinary accompaniment of 
conversation, as it is in parts of Greece to the present day. The 
features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion — certainly 
no more — of saturnine or sarcastic humour. The lips are full, and 
the nose is what is called good by the Itcirned in such matters. 
Several other early portraits of Chaucer exist, all of which are 
stated to bear much resemblance to one anothei". Among them iy 



CHAUCER. 



95 



one in an early if not contemporary copy of Occleve's poems, full- 
length, and superscribed by the hand which wrote the manuscript. 
In another, which is extremely quaint, he appears on horseback, 
in commemoration of his ride to Canterbury, and is represented as 
short of stature, in accordance with the description of himself in 
the Canterbury Tales. 

For, as it fortunately happens, he has drawn his likeness for us 
with his own hand, as he appeared on the occasion to that most 
free-spoken of observers and most personal of critics, the host of 
the Tabard, the " cock " and marshal of the company of pilgrims. 
The fellow-travellers had just been wonderfully sobered fas well 
they might be) by the piteous tale of the Prioress concerning the 
little clergy-boy — how, after the wicked Jews had cut his throat be- 
cause he ever sang O Abjia Redeniptoris^ and had cast him into a 
pit, he was found there by his mother loudly giving forth the hymn 
in honour of the Blessed Virgin which he had loved so well. Mas- 
ter Harry Bailly was, as m duty bound, the first to interrupt by a 
string of jests the silence which had ensued : — 

" And then at first he looked upon me, 
And saide thus : ' What man art thou ? ' quoth he ; 
'Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare, 
For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. 
Approach more near, and looke merrily! 
Now 'ware you, sirs, and let this man have space. 
He in the waist is shaped as well as I ; 
This were a puppet in an arm to embrace 
For any woman, small and fair of face. 
He seemeth elfish by his countenance. 
For unto no wight doth he dalliance.' " 

From this passage we may gather, not only that Chaucer was, as 
the Host of the Tabard's transparent self-irony implies, small of 
stature and slender, but that he was accustomed to be twitted on 
account of the abstracted or absent look which so often tempts 
children of the world to offer its wearer a penny for his thoughts. 
For " elfish " means bewitched by the elves, and hence vacant or 
absent in demeanour. 

It is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, 
that Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces 
his own figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas. But 
mere outward likeness is of little moment, and it is a more inter- 
esting enquiry whether there are any personal characteristics of 
another sort, which it is possible with safety to ascribe to him, and 
which must be, in a greater or less degree, connected with the dis- 
tinctive qualities of his hterary genius ; for in truth it is but a sorry 
makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an 
author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely 
fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author 
has written by something which the man has done or been inclined 
to do. What true poet has sought to hide, or succeeded in hiding, 



(J 6 CHA UCER. 

his moral nature from his muse ? None in the entire band, from 
Petrarch to Villon, and least of all the poet whose song, like so 
much of Chaucer's, seems freshly derived from Nature's own in- 
spiration. 

One very pleasing quality in Chaucer must have been his mod- 
esty. In the course of his life this may have helped to recommend 
him to patrons so many and so various, and to make him the 
useful and trustworthy agent that he evidently became for confiden- 
tial missions abroad. Physically, as has been seen, he represents 
himself as prone to the habit of casting his eyes on the ground ; 
and we may feel tolerably sure that to this external manner corre- 
sponded a quiet, observant disposition, such as that which may be 
held to have distinguished the greatest of Chaucer's successors 
among English poets. To us, of course, this quality of modesty in 
Chaucer makes itself principally manifest in the opinion which he 
incidentally shows himself to entertain concerning his own rank 
and claims as an author. Herein, as in many other points, a con- 
trast is noticeable between him and the great Italian masters, who 
were so sensitive as to the esteem in which they and their poetry 
were held.- Who could fancy Chaucer crowned with laurel, like 
Petrarch, or even, like Dante, speaking with proud humility of 
"the beautiful style that has done honour to him," while acknowl- 
edging his obligation for it to a great predecessor ? Chaucer again 
and again disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to pre- 
eminence, as a poet. His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name 
to disavow, like Persius, having slept on Mount Parnassus, or pos- 
sessing "rhetoric" enough to describe a heroine's beauty ; and he 
openly allows that his spirit grows dull as he grows older, and that 
he finds a difficulty as a translator in matching his rhymes to his 
French original. He acknowledges as incontestable the superiority 
of the poets of classical antiquity : — 

"... Little book, no writing thou envy, 
But subject to be all true poesy, 
And kiss the steps, where'er thou seest space 
Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace."* 

But more than this. In the House of Fame he expressly declaims 
having in his light and imperfect verse sought to pretend to "mas- 
tery " in the art poetical ; and in a charmingly expressed passage 
of \}(\Q. Prologue \.Q> \\\^Legend of Good Women he describes himself 
as merely following in the wake of those who have already 
reaped the harvest of amorous song and have carried away the 
corn : — 

"And I come after, gleaning here and there, 
And am full glad if I can find an ear 
Of any goodly word that ye have left." 

Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain self- 
consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and 

* Statius. 



CHAUCER. 



97 



which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with 
except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities 
seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very differ- 
ent from self-contentedness) which distinguishes Chaucer, and 
which helps to give to his writings a manliness of tone, the direct 
opposite of the irretentive querulousness found in so great a num- 
ber of poets in all times. He cannot, indeed, be said to maintain 
an absolute reserve concerning himself and his affairs in his writ- 
ings; but as he grows older, he seems to become less and less in- 
clined to take the public into his confidence, or to speak of himself 
except in a pleasantly light and incidental fashion. And in the 
same spirit he seems, without ever folding his hands in his lap, or 
ceasing to be a busy man and an assiduous author, to have grown in- 
different to the lack of brilliant success in life, whether as a man of 
letters or otherwise. So at least one seems justified in interpret- 
ing a remarkable passage in the House of Fame, the poem in which 
perhaps, Chaucer allows us to see more deeply into his mind than 
in any other. After surveying the various company of those who 
had come as suitors for the favours of Fame, he tells us how it 
seemed to him (in his long December dream) that some one spoke 
to him in a kindly way, 

*' And saide : ' Friend, what is thy name ? 
Art thou come hither to have fame .-* ' 
' Nay, forsoothe, friend ! ' quoth I ; 
' I came not hither (grand merci !) 
For no such cause, by my head ! 
Sufficeth me, as I were dead, 
That no wight have my name in hand. 
I wot myself best how I stand ; 
For what I suffer, or what I think, 
I will myselfe all it drink. 
Or at least the greater part 
As far forth as I know my art. ' " 

With this modest and manly self-possession we shall not go far 
wrong in connecting what seems another very distinctly marked 
feature of Chaucer's inner nature. He seems to have arrived at a 
clear recognition of the truth with which Goethe humorously com- 
forted Eckermann in the shape of the proverbial saying, "Care has 
been taken that the trees shall not grow into the sky." Chaucer's, 
there is every reason to believe was a contented faith, as far re- 
moved from self-torturing unrest as from childish credulity. Hence 
his refusal to trouble himself, now that he has arrived at a good 
age, with original research as to the constellations. (The passage 
is all the more significant since Chaucer, as has been seen, actually 
possessed a very respectable knowledge of astronomy). That 
winged encyclopaedia, the Eagle, has just been regretting the poet's 
unwillingness to learn the position of the Great and the Little Bear, 
Castor and Pollux, and the rest, concerning which at present he 
does not know where they stand. But he replies, " No matter ! 



98 CHAUCER. 

" *. . . It is no need ; 
I trust as well (so God me speed !) 
Them that write of this matter, 
As though I knew their places there.' " 

Moreover, he says (probably without implying any special allegori- 
cal meaning), they seem so bright that it would destroy my eyes to 
look upon them. Personal inspection, in his opinion, was not ne- 
cessary for a faith which at some times may, and at others must, 
take the place of knowledge ; for we find him, at the opening of the 
Prologue to the Legend of Good Women., in a passage the tone of 
which should not be taken to imply less than its words express, 
writing as follows : — 

"A thousand times I have heard men tell, 
That there is joy in heaven, and pain in hell ; 
And I accorde well that it is so. 
But natheless, yet wot I well also, 
That there is none doth in this country dwell 
That either hath in heaven been or hell, 
Or any other way could of it know, 
But that he heard, or found it written so, 
For by assay may no man proof receive. 

But God forbid that men should not believe 
More things than they have ever seen with eye 
Men shall not fancy everything a lie 
Unless themselves it see, or else it do; 
For, God wot, not the less a thing is true, 
Though every wight may not it chance to see." 

The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives 
a narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than 
that which has been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the 
couplet : — 

" Why then should witless man so much misween 
That nothing is but that which he hath seen ?" 

The negative result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but 
placid way of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, 
alchemy, and all the superstitions which in the Parson'' s Tale are 
noticed as condemned by the Church. This distrust on Chaucer's 
part requires no further illustration after what has been said 
elsewhere ; it would have been well for his age if all its children 
had been as clear-sighted in these matters as he, to whom the 
practices connected with these delusive sciences seemed, and 
justly so from his point of view, no less impious than futile. His 
Cafion Veo7nan's Tale, a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in 
its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most 
effective passages in his comedy The Alchemist, concludes with a 
moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well 
as uselessness, of " multiplying " (making gold by the arts of 
alchemy) : — 



CHAUCER. 99 

"... Whoso maketh God his adversary, 
As for to work anything in contrary 
Unto His will, ccr'tes ne'er shall he thrive, 
Though that he multiply through all his life." 

But equally unmistakeable is the /^jzVzV^ side of this frame of mind 
in such a passage as the following — which is one of those belong- 
ing to Chaucer himself, and not taken from his French original — in 
The Man of Law's Tale. The narrator is speaking of the voyage 
of Constance, after her escape from the massacre in which, at a 
feast, all her fellow-Christians had been killed, and of how she was 
borae by the " wild wave " from " Surrey " (Syria) to the Northum- 
brian shore : 

" Here men might aske, why she was not slain ? 
Eke at the feast who might her body save 'i 
And I answere that demand again : 
"Who saved Daniel in th' horrible cave. 
When every wight save him, master or knave, 
The lion ate — before he could depart.? 
No wight but God, whom he bare in his heart." 

" In her," he continues, " God desired to show His miraculous 
power, so that we should see His mighty works ; for Christ, in 
whom we have a remedy for every ill, often by means of His own 
does things for ends of His own, which are obscure to the wit of 
man, incapable, by reason of our ignorance, of understanding His 
wise providence. But since Constance was not slain at the feast, 
it might be asked : Who kept her from drowning in the sea ? Who, 
then, kept Jonas in the belly of the whale till he was spouted up at 
Ninive ? Well do we know it was no one but He who kept the 
Hebrew people from drowning in the w^aters, and made them to 
pass through the sea with dry feet. Who bade the four spirits of 
the tempest, which have the power to trouble land and sea, north 
and south, and west and east, vex neither sea nor land nor the trees 
that grow on it ? Truly these things were ordered by Him who 
kept this woman safe from the tempest, as well when she awoke as 
wdien she slept. But whence might this woman have meat and 
drink, and how could her sustenance last out to her for three years 
and more ? Who, then, fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the cavern 
or in the desert ? Assuredly no one but Christ. It was a great 
miracle to feed five thousand folk with five loaves and two fishes; 
but God in their great need sent to them abundance." 

As to the sentiments and opinions of Chaucer, then, on matters 
such as these, we can entertain no reasonable doubt. But we are 
altogether too ill acquainted with the details of his personal life, and 
with the motives which contributed to determine its course, to be 
able to arrive at any valid conclusions as to the way in which his 
principles affected his conduct. Enough has been already said 
concerning the attitude seemingly observed by him towards the 
great public questions, and the great historical events, of his day. 



lOo CHAUCER. 

If he had strong political opinions of his own, or strong personal 
views on questions either of ecclesiastical policy or of religious 
doctrine — in which assumptions there seems nothmg probable — he, 
at all events, did not wear his heart on his sleeve, or use his poe- 
try, allegorical or otherwise, as a vehicle of his wishes, hopes, or 
fears on these heads. The true breath of freedom could hardly be 
expected to blow through the precincts of a Plantagenet court. It 
Chaucer could write the pretty lines in the Manciple's Tale about 
the caged bird and its uncontrollable desire for liberty, his contem- 
porary Barbour could apostrophise Freedom itself as a noble thing, 
in words the simple manliness of which stirs the blood after a very 
different fashion. Concerning his domestic relations, we may re- 
gard it as virtually certain that he was unhappy as a husband, 
though tender and affectionate as a father. Considering how vast 
a proportion of the satire of all times — but more especially that of 
the Middle Ages, and in these again pre-eminently of the period of 
European Hterature which took its tone from Jean de Meung — is 
directed against woman and against married life, it would be diffi- 
cult to decide how much of the irony, sarcasm, and fun lavished by 
Chaucer on these themes is due to a fashion with which he readily 
fell in, and how much to the impulse of personal feehng. A per- 
fect anthology, or perhaps one should rather say, a complete her- 
barium, might be collected from his works of samples of these 
attacks on women. He has manifestly make a careful study of 
their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously 
intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson 
or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, 
that women are "full measurable " in such matters as sleep — not 
caring for so much of it at a time as men do ! How wonderfully 
natural is the description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted 
by the news that she is shortly to be surrendered to the Greeks, 
and of the " nice vanity " — i. e., foolish emptiness— of their con- 
solatory gossip. "As men see in town, and all about, that women 
are accustomed to visit their friends," so a swarm of ladies came to 
Cressid, " and sat themselves down, and said as I shall tell. ' I am 
delighted,' says one, ' that you will so soon see your father.' ' In- 
deed I am not so delighted,' says another, 'for we have not seen 
half enough of her since she has been at Troy.' ' I do hope,' quoth 
the third, ' that she will bring us back peace with her ; in which 
case may Almighty God guide her on her departure.' And Cressid 
heard these words and womanish things as if she were far away ; 
for she was burning all the time with another passion than anyof 
which they knew ; so that she almost felt her heart die for woe, and 
for weariness of that company." But his satire against women is 
rarely so innocent as this ; and though several ladies take part in 
the Canterbury Pilgrimage, yet pilgrim after pilgrim has his saw 
or jest against their sex. The courteous Ktiight cannot refrain 
from the generalisation that women all follow the favour of fortune. 
The Sttmmoner, who is of a less scrupulous sort, introduces a dia- 
tribe against women's passionate love of vengeance ; and the Ship- 



CHAUCER. loi 

maji seasons a story which requires no such addition by an enu- 
meration c^ their favourite foibles. But the climax is reached in the 
confessions of the Wife of Bath, who quite unhesitatingly says 
that women are best won by flattery and busy attentions ; that 
when won they desire to have the sovereignty over their husbands, 
and that they tell untruths and swear to them with twice the bold- 
ness of men; while as to the power of their tongue, she quotes the 
second-hand authority of her fifth husband for the saying that it is 
better to dwell with a lion or a foul dragon than with a woman ac- 
customed to chide. It is true that this same IVife of Bath dXso 
observes with an effective tu qtiOjice : 

" By God, if women had but written stories, 
As clerkes have within their oratories, 
They would have writ of men more wickedness 
Than all the race of Adam may redress ; " 

and the Lege7td of Good Women seems, in point of fact, to have 
been intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here de- 
clared to be called for. But the balance still remains heavy against 
the poet's sentiments of gallantry and respect for women. It 
should, at the same time, be remembered tl a" among the Ca7i- 
terbury Tales the two which are of their kind the most effective 
constitute tributes to the most distinctively feminine and wifely 
virtue of fidelity. Moreover, when coming from such personages 
as the pilgrims who narrate the Tales in question, the praise of 
women has special significance and value. The Merchaitt and the 
Shipman may indulge in facetious or coarse jibes against wives 
and their behaviour ; but the Man jf Law., full of grave experience 
of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of 
which his narrative celebrates so illustrious an example, while the 
Clerk of Oxford has in his cloistered solitude, where all womanly 
blandishments are unknown, come to the conclusion that 

" Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness, 
As clerkes, when they list, can well indite, 
Of men in special ; but, in truthfulness, 
Though praise by clerks of women be but slight. 
No man in humbleness can him acquit 
As women can, nor can be half so true 
As women are, unless all things be new." 

As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in 
that style of laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time im- 
memorial been affected both in comic writing and on the comic 
stage, but which in the end even the most determined old bachelor 
feels an occasional inclination to consider monotonous. 

In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must 
be set down to conventionality. Yet the best part of Chaucer's 
nature, it is hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor 
commonplace. He was not, we may rest assured, one of that nu* 



102 CHAUCER. 

merous class which in his day, as it does in ours, composed the 
population of the land of Philistia — the persons so well defined by 
Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the the 
noblest type) : — 

" Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents 
On sensual lust, on dignit}^, and rents." 

Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of 
suitable employment and of a sufficient income ; nor can we sup- 
pose him to have been one of those who looks upon social life and 
its enjoyments with a jaundiced eye, or who, absorbed in things which 
are not of this world, avert their gaze from it altogether. But it is 
hardly possible that rank and position should have been valued on 
their own account by one who so repeatedly recurs to his ideal of 
the true gentleman, as to a conception dissociated from more out- 
ward circumstances, and more particularly independent of birth or 
inherited wealth. At times, we know, men find what they seek ; 
and so Chaucer found in Boethius and in Guillaume de Lorris that 
conception which he both translates and reproduces, besides re- 
peating it in a little Ballade^ probably written by him in the last 
decennium of his life. By far the best-known and the finest of 
these passages is that in the Wife of B aM s Tale^ which follows the 
round assertion that the " arrogance " against which it protests is 
not worth a hen : and which is followed by an appeal to a parallel 
passage in Dante : — 

" Look, who that is most virtuous alway 
Privy and open, and most intendeth aye 
To do the gentle deedes that he can, 
Take him for the greatest gentleman. 
Christ wills we claim of Him our gentleness, 
Not of our elders for their old riches. 
For though they give us all their heritage 
Through which we claim to be of high parage,. 
Yet may they not bequeathe for no thing — 
To none of us — their virtuous living, 
That made them gentlemen y-called be, 
And bade us follow them in such degree. 
Well can the wise poet of Florence, 
That Dante highte, speak of this sentence ; 
Lo, in such manner of rhyme is Dante's tale : 
* Seldom upriseth by its branches small 
Prowess of man ; for God of His prowess 
Wills that we claim of Him our gentleness ; 
For of our ancestors we no thing claim 
But temporal thing, that men may hurt and maim,' "* 

The passage in Canto viii. of the Pur gator io is thus translated by Longfellow: 
" Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches 
The probity of man ; and this He wills 
Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him." 
Its intention is only to show that the son is not necessarily what the father is before him ,' 
thus, Edward I. of Englanh is a mightier man than was his father Henry III. Chaucej 
has ingeniously, though not altogether legitimately, pressed the passage into his service. 



CHAUCER. 



103 



But the still ignobler greed of money for its own sake, there is 
no reason whatever to suppose Chaucer to have been at any time 
actuated; although, under the pressure of immediate want, he 
devoted a Complamt to his empty purse, and made known, in the 
proper quarters, his desire to see it refilled. Finally, as to what is 
commonly called pleasure, he may have shared the fashion and 
even the vices of his age ; but we know hardly anything on the 
subject, except that excess in wine, which is often held a pardon- 
able peccadillo in a poet, receives his emphatic condemnation. It 
would be hazardous to assert of him, as Herrick asserted of himself, 
that though his " Muse was jocund, his life was chaste ; " inasmuch 
as his name occurs in one unfortunate connection full of suspicious- 
ness. But we may at least believe him to have spoken his own 
sentiments in the Doctor of Physic's manly declaration that 

"... Of all treason sovereign pestilence 
Is when a man betrayeth innocence." 

His true pleasures lay far away from those of vanity and dissi- 
pation. In the first place, he seems to have been a passionate 
reader. To his love of books he is constantly referring ; indeed, 
this may be said to be the only kind of egotism which he seems to 
take a pleasure in indulging. At the opening of his earliest extant 
poem of consequence, the Book of the Duchess, he tells us how he 
preferred to drive away a night rendered sleepless through melan- 
choly thoughts, by means of a book, which he thought better enter- 
tainment than a game either at chess or at " tables." This passion 
lasted longer with him than the other passion which it had helped 
to allay ; for in the sequel to the well known passage in the House 
of Fa77te, already cited, he gives us a glimpse of himself at home, 
absorbed in his favourite pursuit : — 

" Thou go' St home to thy house anoi 
And there, as dumb as any stone, 
Thou sittest at another book, 
Till fully dazed is thy look ; 
And liv'st thus as a hermit quite, 
Although thy abstinence is slight." 

And doubtless he counted the days lost in which he was prevented 
from following the rule of life which elsewhere he sets himself, 
" to study and to read alway, day by day," and pressed even the 
nights into his service when he was not making his head ache 
with writing. How eager and, considering the times in which he 
lived, how diverse a reader he was, has already been abundantly 
illustrated in the course of this volume. His knowledge of Holy 
Writ was considerable, though it probably, for the most part, came 
to him at second-hand. He seems to have had some acquaintance 
with patristic and homiletic literature ; he produced a version of 
the homily on Mary Magdalene, improperly attributed to Origen ; 
and, as we have seen, emulated King Alfred in translating Bo- 



I04 CHAUCER. 

ethius's famous mannal of moral philosophy. His Latin learning 
extended over a wide range of literature, from Virgil and Ovid 
down to some of the favourite Latin poets of th.e Middle Ages. It 
is to be feared that he occasionally read Latin authors with so 
eager a desire to arrive at the contents of their books that he at 
times mistook their meaning — not far otherwise, slightly to vary a 
happy comparison made l)y one of his most eminent commentators, 
than many people read Chaucer's writings now-a-days. That he 
possessed any knowledge at all of Greek may be doubted, both on 
general grounds and on account of a little shp or two in quotation 
of a kind not unusual with those who quote what they have not 
previously read. His T7'oilus and Cressid has only a very distant 
connexion, indeed, with Homer, whose Iliad, before it furnished 
materials for the mediaeval Troilus-legend, had been filtered through 
a brief Latin epitome, and diluted into a Latin novel, and a journal 
kept at the seat of war, of altogether apocryphal value. And, in- 
deed, it must in general be conceded that, if Chaucer had read 
much, he lays claim to having read more ; for he not only occasion- 
ally ascribes to known authors works which we can by no means 
feel certain as to their having written, but at times he even cites 
(or is made to cite, in all the editions of his works) authors who are 
altogether unknown to fame by the names which he gives to them. 
But then it must be remembered that other mediaeval writers have 
rendered themselves liable to the same kind of charge. Quoting 
was one of the dominant literary fashions of the age ; and just as 
a word without an oath went for but little in conversation, so a 
statement or sentiment in writing acquired a greatly enhanced 
value when suggested by authority, even after no more precise a 
fashion than the use of the phrase " as old books say. In Chaucer's ' 
days the equivalent of the modern, " I have seen it said somewhere'''' 
— with, perhaps, the venturesome addition : " I think, in Horace " 
— had clearly not become an objectionable expletive. 

Of modern literature there can be no doubt that Chaucer had 
made substantially his own the two which could be of importance 
to him as a poet. His obligations to the French singers have 
probably been over-estimated — at all events, if the view adopted 
in this essay be the correct one, and if the charming poem of the 
Flower and the Leaf, together with the lively, but as to its meaning 
not very transparent, so-called Chaucer'' s Dream, be denied admis- 
sion among his genuine works. At the same time, the influence of 
the Ro7nan de la Rose and that of the courtly poets, of whom 
Machault was the chief in France and Froissart the representative 
in England, are perceptible in Chaucer almost to the last, nor is it 
likely that he should ever have ceased to study and assimilate them. 
On the other hand, the extent of his knowledge of Italian literature 
has probably till of late been underrated in an almost equal degree. 
This knowledge displays itself not only in the imitation or adapta- 
tion of particular poems, but more especially in the use made of inci- 
dental passages and details. In this way his debts to Dante were 
especially numerous ; and it is curious to find proofs so abundant 



CHAUCER. 



105 



of Chaucer's relatively close study of a poet with whose genius his 
own had so few points in common. Notwithstanding first appear- 
ances, it is an open question whether Chaucer had ever read 
Boccaccio's Decamerone, with which he may merely have had in 
common the sources of several of his Canterbury Tales. But as he 
certainly took one of them from the Teseide (without improving it 
in the process), and not less certainly, and adapted the Filostrato 
in his Troilus and Cressid^ it is strange that he should refrain from 
naming the author to whom he was more indebted than to any one 
other for poetic materials. 

But wide and diverse as Chaucer's reading fairly deserves to be 
called, the love of nature was even stronger and more absorbing in 
him than the love of books. He has himself, in a very charming 
passage, compared the strength of the one and of the other of his 
predilections : — 

" And as for me, though I have knowledge sHght, 
In bookes for to read I me deHght, 
And to them give I faith and full credence, 
And in my heart have them in reverence 
So heartily, that there is game none 
That from my bookes maketh me be gone, 
But it be seldom on the holiday — 
Save, certainly, when that the month of May 
Is come, and that I hear the fowles sing, 
And see the flowers as they begin to spring. 
Farewell my book, and my devotion." 

Undoubtedly the literary fashion of Chaucer's times is responsible 
for part of this May-morning sentiment, with which he is fond of be- 
ginning liis poems (the Canterbury pilgrimage is dated towards the 
end of April — but is not April " messenger to May ? "). It had been 
decreed that flowers should be the badges of nations and dynasties, 
and the tokens of amorous sentiment ; the rose had its votaries, and 
the lily, lauded by Chaucer's Prioress as the symbol of the Blessed 
Virgin ; while the daisy, which first sprang from the tears of a for- 
lorn damsel, in France gave its name {marguerite) to an entire 
species of courtly verse. The enthusiastic adoration professed by 
Chaucer, in the Prologue to the Legend of Good IVomen, for the 
daisy, which he afterwards identifies with the good Alceste, the type 
of faithful wifehood, is, of course, ^a mere poetical figure. But 
there is in his use of these favourite literary devices, so to speak, a 
variety in sameness significant of their accordance with his own 
taste, and of the frank and fresh love of nature which animated him, 
and which seems to us as much a part of him as his love of books. 
It is unlikely that his personality, will ever become more fully 
known than it is at present ; nor is there anytiiing in respect of 
which we seem to see so clearly into his inner nature as with regard 
to these twin predilections, to which he remains true in all his works 
and in all his moods. While the study of books was his chief pas- 
sion, nature was his chief joy and solace ; while his genius enabled 



Io6 CHAUCER. 

him to transfuse what he read in the former, what came home to 
him in the latter was akin to that genius itself; for he at times re- 
minds us of his own fresh Canace, whom he describes as looking 
so full of happiness during her walk through the wood at sun- 
rise :— 

" What for the season, what for the morning 
And for the fowles that she hearde sing, 
For right anon she wiste what they meant 
Right by their song, and knew all their intent." 

If the above view of Chaucer's character and intellectual tastes 
and tendencies be in the main correct, there will seem to be noth- 
ing paradoxical in describing his literary progress, so far as its 
data are ascertainable, as a most steady and regular one. Very 
few men awake to find themselves either famous or great of a sud- 
den, and perhaps as few poets as other men, though it may be her- 
esy against a venerable maxim to say so. Chaucer's works form a 
clearly recognisable series of steps towards the highest achievement 
of which, under the circumstances in which he lived and wrote, he 
can be held to have been capable ; and his long and arduous self- 
training, whether consciously or not directed to a particular end, 
was of that sure kind from which genius itself derives strength. 
His beginnings as a writer were dictated, partly by the impulse of 
that imitative faculty which, in poetic natures, is the usual pre- 
cursor of the creative, partly by the influence of prevaihng tastes 
and the absence of native English literary predecessors whom, con- 
sidering the circumstances of his life and the nature of his tempera- 
ment, he could have found it a congenial task to follow. French 
poems were, accordingly, his earliest models ; but fortunately (un- 
like Gower, whom it is so instructive to compare with Chaucer, 
precisely because the one lacked that gift of genius which the other 
possessed) he seems at once to have resolved to make use for his 
poetical writings of his native speech. In no way, therefore, could 
he have begun his career with so happy a promise of its future as 
in that which he actually chose. Nor could any course so naturally 
have led him to introduce into his poetic diction the French idioms 
and words already used in the spoken language of Englishmen, 
more especially in those classes for which he in the first instance 
v/rote, and thus to confer upon our tongue the great benefit which 
it owes to him. Agaiurmost fortunately, others had already pointed 
the way to the selection for literary use of that Enghsh dialect 
which was probably the most suitable for the purpose ; and Chaucer, 
as a Southern man (like \\\s, Parson of a Town), belonged to a 
part of the country where the old alliterative verse had long since 
been discarded for classical and romance forms of versification. 
Thus the Roinaunt of the Ross most suitably opens his hterary 
life — a translation in which there is nothing original except an 
occasional turn of phrase, but in which the translator finds oppor- 
tunity for exercising his powers of judgment by virtually re-edit- 
ing the work before him. And already in the Book of the Duchess, 



CHAUCER. 107 

though most unmistakeably a follower of Machault, he is also the 
rival of the great P'rench trotcvhre, and has advanced in freedom of 
movement not less than in agreeableness of form. Then, as his 
travels extended his acquaintance with foreign literatures to that 
of Italy, he here found abundant fresh materials from which to feed 
his productive powers, and more elaborate forms in which to clothe 
their results; while at the same time comparison, the kindly nurse 
of originality, more and more enabled him to recast instead of imi- 
tating, or encouraged him freely to invent. In Trolius and Crcssid 
he produced something very different from a mere condensed trans- 
lation, and achieved a work in which he showed himself a master 
of poetic expression and sustained narrative ; in the House of 
Fame and the AssE/jibly of Fowls he moved with freedom in hap- 
pily contrived allegories of his own invention ; and with the Legend 
of Good Wo-)icn lis had already arrived at a stage when he could 
undertake to review, under a pleasant pretext, but with evident 
consciousness of work done, the list of his previous works. " He 
hath," he said of himself, "made many a lay and many a thing." 
Meanwhile the labor incidentally devoted by him to translation 
from the Latin, or to the composition of prose treatises in the schol- 
astic manner of academical exercises, could but little affect his gen- 
eral literary progress. The mere scholarship of youth, even if it 
be the reverse of close and profound, is wont to cling to a man 
through life, and to assert its modest claims at any season; and 
thus Chaucer's school-learning exercised little influence either of 
an advan'^ing or of a retarding kind upon the full development of 
his genius. Nowhere is lu so truly himself as in the masterpiece 
of his last years. P^or the Cante?'bu?y Tales, in which he is at once 
greatest, most original, and most catholic in the choice of materials 
as well as in moral sympathies, bears the unmistakeable stamp of 
having formed the crowning labor of his life — a work which death 
alone prevented him from completing. 

It may be said, without presumption, that such a general view 
as this leaves ample room for ail reasonable theories as to the 
chronology and sequence, where these remain more or less un- 
settled, of Chaucer's indisputably genuine works. In any case, 
there is no poet whom, if only as an exercise in critical analysis, it 
is more interesting to study and re-study in connexion with the 
circumstances of his literary progress. He still, as has been seen, 
belongs to the Middle Ages, but to a period in which the noblest 
ideals of these Middle Ages are already beginning to pale and 
their mightiest institutions to quake around him ; in which learning 
continues to be in the main sciiolasticism, the linking of argument 
with argument, and tlie accumulation of authority upon authority, 
and poetry remains to a great extent the crabbedness of clerks or 
the formality of courts. Again, Chaucer is mediaeval in tricks of 
style and turns of phrase ; he often contents himself with the tritest of 
figures and the most unrefreshing of ancient devices, and freely 
resorts to a mixture of names and associations belonging to his 
own times with others derived from other ages. This want of 



io8 CHAUCER. 

literary perspective is a sure sign of mediaevalism, and one which 
has amused the world, or has jarred upon it, since the Renascence 
taught men to study both classical and Biblical antiquity as real- 
ities, and not merely as a succession of pictures or of tapestries on 
a wall. Chaucer mingles things mediaeval and things classical 
as freely as he brackets King David with the philosopher Seneca, 
or Judas Iscariot with the Greek "dissimulator" Sinon. His 
Dido, mounted on a stout palfrey paper-white of hue, with a red- 
and-gold saddle embroidered and embossed, resembles Alice 
Ferrers in all her pomp rather than the Virgilian queen. Jupiter's 
eagle, the poet's guide and instructor in the allegory of the 
House of Fame^ invokes " Saint Mary, Saint James," and " Saint 
Clare " all at once ; and the pair of lovers at Troy sign their letters 
" /(X vostre 7"." and '•'■la vostre C.'''' Anachronisms of this kind . 
(of the danger of which, by the way, to judge from a passage 
in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women^ Chaucer would 
not appear to have been wholly unconscious) are intrinsically 
of very slight importance. But the morality of Chaucer's nar-. 
ratives is at times the artificial and overstrained morality of 
the Middle Ages, which, as it were, clutches hold of a single 
idea to the exclusion of all others — a morality which, when 
carried to its extreme consequences, makes monomaniacs as well 
as martyrs, in both of which species, occasionally, perhaps, com- 
bined in the same persons, the Middle Ages abound. The fidelity 
of Griseldis under the trials imposed upon her by her, in point of 
fact, brutal husband is the fidelity of a martyr to unreason. The 
story was afterwards put on the stage in the Elizabethan age ; and 
though even in the play of Patient Grissil (by Chettle and others) 
it is not easy to reconcile the husband's proceedings with the 
promptings of common sense, yet the play-wrights, with the instinct 
of their craft, contrived to introduce some element of humanity 
into his character, and of probability into his conduct. Again, the 
supra-chivalrous respect paid by Arviragus, the Breton knight of 
the Franklht's Tale, to the sanctity of his wife's word, seriously to 
the peril of his own and his wife's honour, is an effort to which 
probably even the Knight of La Mancha himself would have proved 
unequal. It is not to be expected that Chaucer should have failed 
to share some of the prejudices of his times as well as to fall in 
with their ways of thought and sentiment; and though it is the 
Prioress who tells a story against the Jews which passes the legend 
of Hugh of Lincoln, yet it would be very hazardous to seek any 
irony in this legend of bigotry. In general, much of that naivete 
which to modern readers seems Chaucer's most obvious literary 
quality must be ascribed to the times in which he lived and wrote. 
This quality is, in truth, by no means that which most deeply im- 
presses itself upon the observation of any one able to compare 
Chaucer's writings with those of. his more immediate predecessors 
and successors. But the sense in which the term w^z/* should be 
understood in literary criticism is so imperfectly agreed upon among 
us, that we have not yet even found an English equivalent foi 
the word. 



CHAUCER. 



109 



To Chaucer's times, then, belongs much of what may at first 
sight seem to include itself among the characteristics of his genius ; 
while, on the other hand, there are to be distinguished from these 
the influences due to his training and studies in two literatures — 
the French and the Italian. In the former of these he must have 
felt at home, if not by birth and descent, at all events by social con- 
nexion, habits of life, and ways of thought ; while in the latter he, 
whose own country's was still a half-fledged literary life, found 
ready to his hand masterpieces of artistic maturity lofty in con- 
ception, broad in bearing, finished in form. There still remain, 
for summary review, the elements proper to his own poetic indi- 
viduahty — those which mark him out not only as the first great poet 
of his own nation, but as a great poet for all times. 

The poet must please ; if he wishes to be successful and popu- 
lar, he must suit himself to the tastes of his public ; and even if he 
be indifferent to immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of 
the impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live, 
in a sense, with a.nd/or his generation. To meet this demand 
upon his genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which 
he carefully and assiduously exercised in a long series of poetical 
experiments, and which he was able felicitously 'to combine for the 
achievements of results unprecedented in our literature. In readi- 
ness of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, 
and in flow of diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any Eng- 
lish poet, till he was surpassed — it seems not too much to say, in 
all three respects — by Spenser. His verse, where it suits his pur- 
pose, glitters, to use Dunbar's expression, as with fresh enamel, 
and its hues are variegated like those of a Flemish tapestry. Even 
where his descriptive enumerations seem at first sight monotonous 
or perfunctory, they are, in truth, graphic and true in their details, 
as in the list of birds in the Assembly of Fowls, quoted in part on 
an earlier page of this essay, and in the shorter list of trees in the 
same poem, which is, however, in its general features, imitated 
from Boccaccio. Neither King James I, of Scotland, nor Spenser, 
who after Chaucer essayed similar tours de force, were happier 
than he had been before them. Or we may refer to the description 
or the preparations for the tournament and of the tournament itself 
in the Kiiighfs Tale, or to the thoroughly Dutch picture of a dis- 
turbance in a farm-yard in the Nu7t's Priesfs. The vividness with 
which Chaucer describes scenes and events as if he had them be- 
fore his own eyes, was no doubt, in the first instance, a result of 
his own imaginative temperament ; but one would probably not go 
wrong in attributing the fulness of the use which he made of 
this gift to the influence of his Italian studies — more especially to 
those which led him to Dante, whose multitudinous characters 
and scenes impress themselves with so singular and immediate a 
definiteness upon the imagination. At the same time, Chaucer's 
resources seem inexhaustible for filling up or rounding off his nar- 
ratives with the aid of chivalrous love or religious legend, by the 
introduction of samples of scholastie discourse or devices of per- 



1 1 o CHA UCER. 

sonal or general allegory. He commands, where necessary, a 
rhetorician's readiness of illustration, and a masque-writer's inven- 
tivness, as to m_achinery; he can even (in the House of Fame) 
conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent phantasraagory of his 
own, and continue it with a fulness proving that his fancy would 
not be at a loss for supplying even more materials than he cares 
to employ. 

But Chaucer's poetry derived its power to please from yet 
another quality ; and in this he was the first of our English poets 
to emulate the poets of the two literatures to which in the matter 
of his productions and in the ornaments of his diction, he owed so 
much. There is in his verse a music which hardly ever wholly 
loses itself, and which at times is as sweet as that in any English 
poet after him. 

This assertion is not one which is likely to be gainsaid at the 
present day, when there is not a single lover of Chaucer who would 
sit down contented with Drj^den's condescending mixture of cen- 
sure and praise. "The verse of Chaucer," he wrote, " I confess, 
is not harmonious to us. They who lived with him, and some time 
after him, thought it musical ; and it continues so, even in our judg- 
ment, if compared with the numbers of Lydgate and Gower, his 
contemporaries : there is a rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, 
which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." At the same 
time, it is no doubt necessary, in order to verify the correctness of 
a less balanced judgment, to take the trouble, which, if it could but 
be believed, is by no means great, to master the rules and usages 
of Chaucerian versification. These rules and usages the present 
is not a fit occasion for seeking to explain.* 

* It may, hov/ever, be stated that they only partially connect themselves with Chaucer's 
use of forms which are now obsolete — more especially of inflexions of verbs and substan- 
tives (including several instances of the famous final e), and contractions with the negative 
ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a vowel, of the initial syllables of words be- 
ginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in 
spelling and pronunciation — such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and some- 
times not) at the end of words in which it is now no longer retained, and, again, the fre- 
quent accentuation of many words of French origin in their last syllable, as in French, 
and of certain words of English origin analogously — are to be looked for as a matter of 
course in a last writing in the period of our language in which Chaucer lived. He clearly 
foresaw the difficulties which would be caused to his readers by the variations of usage in 
s]ieliing and pronunciation-— variations to some extent rendered inevitable by the fact that 
he wrote in an English dialect which was only gradually coming to be accepted as the uni- 
form language of English writers. Towards the close of his Troilus and Cressid he thus 
addresses his " little book." in fear of the mangling it might undergo from scriveners who 
might blunder in the copying of its words, or from reciters who might maltreat its verse in 
the distribution of the accents : — 

*' And, since there is so great diversity 
In English, and in wxiting of our tongue, 
I pray to God that none may miswrite thee 
Nor thee mismetre, for default of tongue, 
And wheresoe'er thou mayst be read or sung, 
That thou be understood, God I beseech." 

_ But in his versification he likewise adopted certain other practices which had no such 
origin or reason as those already referred to. Among them were the addition, at the end 
of a line of five accents, of an unaccented syllable ; and the substitution, for the first foot 
of a line either of four or five accents, of a single syllable. These deviations from a stricter 
system of versification he doubtless permitted to himself, partly for the sake of variety, 



CIIA UCKR. r 1 1 

With regard to the most important of them, is it not too much 
to say that instinct and experience will very speedily combine to 
indicate to an intelligent reader where the poet has resorted to it. 
Without intelligence on the part of the reader, the beautiful har- 
monies of Mr. Tennyson's later verse remain obscure ; so that, taken 
in this way, the most musical of English verse may seem as diffi- 
cult to read as the most rugged ; but in the former case the lesson 
is learnt not to be lost again; in the latter, the tumbling is ever 
beginning anew, as with the rock of Sisyphus. There is nothing 
that can fairly be called rugged in the verse of Chaucer. 

And fortunately, there are not many pages in this poet's works 
devoid of lines or passages the music of which cannot escape any 
ear, however unaccustomed it may be to his diction and versifica- 
tion. What is the nature of the art at whose bidding ten monosyl- 
lables arrange themselves into a line of the exquisite cadence of 
the following : — 

" And she was fair, as is the rose in May } " 

Nor would it be easy to find lines surpassing in their melancholy 
charm Chaucer's version of the lament of Medea when deserted by 
Jason — a passage which makes the reader neglectful of the Enghsh 
poet's modest hint that the letter of the Colchian princess may be 
found at full length in Ovid. The lines shall be quoted verbatim^ 
though not literathn ; and perhaps no better example, and none 
more readily appreciable by a modern ear, could be given than the 
fourth ofthem of the harmonious effect of Chaucer's usage of slurr- 
ing^ referred to above : — 

" Why liked thee my yellow hair to see 
More than the boundes of mine honesty? 

and partly for that of convenience ; but neither of them is peculiar to himself, or of 
supreme importance for the effect of his verse. In fact, he seems to allow as much in a 
passage of his House of Fame — a ]3oem written, it should, however, be observed, in an 
easy-going form of verse (the hne of four accents) which in his later period Chaucer seems, 
with this exception, to have invariably dist'arded. He here beseeches Apollo to make his 
rhyme 

"... Somewhat agreeable, 
Though some verse fail in a syllable." 

But another of his usages — the misunderstanding of which has more than anything else 
caused his art as a writer of a verse to be misjudged — seems to have been due to a very 
different cause. To understand the real nature of the usage in question it is only neces- 
sary to seize the principle of Chaucer's rhythm. Of this principle it was well said many 
years ago by a most competent authority — Mr. R. Ho -ne — that it is " *iseparable from a 
full or fair exercise of tb.e genius of our language in versification." For though this usage 
]n its full freedom was gradually again lost to our poetry for a time, yet it was in a large 
measure recovered by Shakspeare and the later dramatists of our great age, and has since 
been never altogether abandoned again — not even by the correct writers of the Augustan 
period — till by the favourites of our own times it is resorted tn w ih a perhaps excessive 
liberality. It consists simply in shirring ov&r certain final syllab.es — not eliding them or 
contracting them with the syllables following upon them, but passing over them lightly, so 
that, without being inaudible, they may at the same time not interfere with the rhythm or 
beat of the verse. This usage, by adding to the variety, incontestably adds to the flex- 
ibihty and beauty of Chaucer's versification. 



112 CHAUCER. 

Why liked me thy youth and thy fairness 
And of thy tongue the infinite graciousness ? 
O, had'st thou in thy conquest dead y-bee{n), 
Full myckle untruth had there died with thee." 

Qualities and powers such as the above have belonged to poets 
of very various times and countries before and after Chaucer. 
But in addition to these he most assuredly possessed others, which 
are not usual among the poets of our nation, and which, whence- 
soever they had come to him personally, had not, before they 
made their appearance in him, seemed indigenous to the English 
soil. It would, indeed, be easy to misrepresent the history of 
English poetry, during the period which Chaucer's advent may be 
said to have closed, by ascribing to it a uniformly solemn and seri- 
ous, or even dark and gloomy, character. Such a description would 
not apply to the poetry of the period before the Norman Conquest, 
though, in truth, little room could be left for the play of fancy or 
wit in the hammered-out war-song, or in the long-drawn Scriptural 
paraphrase. Nor was it likely that a contagious gaiety should find 
an opportunity of manifesting itself in the course of the versifica- 
tion of grave historical chronicles, or in the tranquil objective repro- 
duction of the endless traditions of British legend. Of the popular 
songs belonging to the period after the Norman Conquest, the re- 
mains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence concerning 
them hardly enable us to form an opinion. But we know that (the 
cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque Rhy7ne of Sir Thopas not- 
withstanding) the eJEforts of English metrical romance in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble, 
although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes 
abridgments to boot — even the Arthurian cycle having been only 
imported across the Channel, though it may have thus come back 
to its original home. There is some animation in at least one 
famous chronicle in verse, dating from about the close Of the thir- 
teenth century; there is real spirit in the war-songs of Minot in 
the middle of the fourteenth ; and from about its beginning dates a 
satire full of broad fun concerning the jolly life led by the monks. 
But none of these works or of those contemporary with them show 
that innate lightness and buoyancy of tone which seems to add 
wings to the art of poetry. Nowhere had the English mind found 
so real an opportunity of poetic utterance in the days of Chaucer's 
own youth as in Langland's unique work, national in its allegorical 
form and in its alliterative metre ; and nowhere had this utterance 
been more stern and severe. 

No sooner, however, has Chaucer made his appearance as a 
poet, than he seems to show what mistress's badge he wears, 
which party of the two that have at most times divided among them 
a national literature and its representatives he intends to follow. 
The burden of his song is " Si douce est la marguerite ; " he has 
learnt the- ways of French gallantry as if to the manner born, and 
thus becomes, as it were without hesitation or effort, the first Eng- 



CHAUCER. 



"3 



lish love-poet. Nor though in the course of his career his range 
of themes, his command of materials, and his choice of forms are 
widely enlarged — is the gay banner under which he has ranged 
himself ever deserted by him. With the exception of the House 
of Fame ^ there is not one of his longer poems of which the passion 
of love, under one or another of its aspects, does not either con- 
stitute the main subject or (as in the Canterbury Tales) furnish 
the greater part of the contents. It is as a love-poet that Gower 
thinks of Chaucer when paying a tribute to him in his own verse ; 
it is to the attacks made upon him in his character as a love-poet, 
and to his consciousness of what he has achieved as such, that he 
gives expression in \\\q. Prologtie \o tht Legend of Good lVo7nent 
where his fair'advocate tells the God of Love : — 

" The man hath served you of his cunning, 
And furthered well your law in his writing, 
All be it that he cannot well indite, 
Yet hath he made unlearned folk delight 
To serve you in praising of you name." 

And so he resumes his favourite theme once more, to tell, as the 
Man of Law says, "of lovers up and down, more than Ovid makes 
mention of in his old Epistles?'' This fact alone— that our first 
great English poet was also our first English love-poet, properly 
so called — would have sufficed to transform our poetic literature 
through his agency. 

What, however, calls for special notice, in connexion with 
Chaucer's special poetic quahty of gaiety and brightness, is the 
preference which he exhibits for treating the joyous aspects of 
this many-sided passion. Apart from the Lege7id of Good Women, 
which is specially designed to give brilliant examples of the faith- 
fulness of women under circumstances of trial, pain, and grief, and 
from two or three of the Canterbttry Tales, he dwells, with consist- 
ent preference, on the bright side of love, though remaining a 
stranger to its divine radiance, which shines forth so fully upon us 
out of the pages of Spenser. Thus, in the Asse?nbly of Fowls all 
is gaiety and mirth, as indeed beseems the genial neighbourhood 
of Cupid's temple. Again, in Troilus and Cressid, the earlier and 
cheerful part of the love-story is that which he develops with un- 
mistakeable sympathy and enjoyment ; and in his hands this part 
of tlie poem becomes one of the most charming poetic narratives 
of the birth and growth of young love which our literature pos- 
sesses—a soft and sweet counterpart to the consuming heat of 
Marlowe's unrivalled Hero and Leander. With Troilus it was love 
at first sight — with Cressid a passion of very gradual growth. But 
so full of nature is the narrative of this growth, that one is irre- 
sistibly reminded at more than one point of the inimitable creations 
of the great modern master in the description of women's love. 
Is there not a touch of Gretchen in Cressid, retiring into her 
chamber to ponder over the first revelation to her of the love oi 
Troilus .'' — 



114 CHAUCER. 

" Cressid arose, no longer there she stayed, 
But straight into her closet went anon, 
And set her down, as still as any stone. 
And every word gan up and down to wind. 
That he had said, as it came to her mind." 

And is there not a touch of CJarchen in her — though with a differ- 
ence — when from her casement she blushingly beholds her lover 
riding past in triumph : 

" So like a man of armes and a knignt 
He was to see, filled full of high prowess, 
For both he had a body, and a might 
To do that thing, as well as hardiness ; 
And eke to see him in his gear him dress. 
So fresh, so young, so wieldly seemed he, 
It truly was a heaven him for to see. 

" His helm was hewn about in twenty places, 
That by a tissue hung his back behind ; 
His shield was dashed with strokes of swords and maces, 
In which men mighte many an arrow find 
That pierced had the horn and nerve and rind ; 
And aye the people cried : ' Here comes our joy. 
And, next his brother, holder up of Troy.'" 

Even in \}ci^vQ.xy Book of the DucJiess^ the widowed lover describes 
the maiden charms of his lost wife with so lively a freshness as 
almost to make one forget that it is a lost wife whose praises are 
being recorded. 

The vivacity and joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament, 
however, show themselves in various other ways besides his 
favourite manner of treating a favourite theme. They enhance 
the spirit of his passages of dialogue, and add force and freshness 
to his passages of description. They make him amusingly impa- 
tient of epical lengths, abrupt in his transitions, and anxious, with 
an anxiety usually manifested by readers rather than by writers, to 
come to the point, " to the great effect," as he is wont to call it. 
"Men," Jie says, "may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I 
will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip." And he 
unconsciously suggests a striking difference between himself and 
the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when 
he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of 
the corn,and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast i-^r/iz///// ,* 

" The fruit of every tale is for to say : 
They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play." 

This may be the fruit ; but epic poets, from Homer downwards, 
have been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage. 
Spenser, in particular, has that impartial copiousness which we 
think it our duty to admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if the 



CFTA UCER. 



IIS 



truth were told, has prevented generations of Englishmen from ac- 
quiring an intimate personal acquaintance with the Fairy Queen. 
With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in an op])osite direc- 
tion. Most assuredly he can tell a story with admirable point and 
precision, when he wishes to do so. Perhaps no better example 
of his skill in this respect could be cited than the Maiiciple\ Tale, 
with its rapid narrative, its major and minor catastrophe, and its 
concise moral, ending thus : — 

/'" My son, beware, and be no author new 
/ Oi tidings, wliether they be false or true ; 
Whereso thou comest, among higli or low, 
Keep well thy tongue, and think upon the crow." 

At the same time, his frequently recurring announcements of his 
desire to be brief have the effect of making his narrative appear 
to halt, and thus, unfortunately, defeat their own purpose. An ex- 
ample of this may be found in the Knighf's, Tale, a narrative poem 
of wliich, in contrast with its beauties, a want of evenness is one of 
the chief defects. It is not that the desire. to suppress redundan- 
-ciesisa tendency deserving anything but commendation in any 
writer, whether great or small ; but rather, that the art of conceal- 
ing art had not yet dawned upon Chaucer. And yet few writers 
of any time have taken a more evident pleasure in the process of 
literary production, and have more visibly overflowed with sym- 
pathy for, or antipathy against, the characters of their own creation. 
Great novelists of our own age have often told their readers, in 
prefaces to their fictions or in ^zmj"z-confidential comments upon 
them, of the intimacy in which they have lived with the offspring 
of their own brain, to them far from shadowy beings. But only 
the naivele of Chaucer's literary age, together Avith the vivacity of 
his manner of thought and writing, could place him in so close a 
personal relation towards the personages and the incidents of his 
poems. He is overcome by " pity and ruth " as he reads of suffer- 
ing, and his eyes "wax foul and sore" as he prepares to tell of 
its intiiction. He compassionates " love's servants " as if he were 
their own "brother dear;" and into his adaptation of the eventful 
story of Constance (the Maji of Law's Tale) he introduces apos- 
trophe upon apostrophe, to the defenceless condition of his heroine 
— to her relentless enemy the Sultana, and to Satan, who ever 
makes his instrument of women " when he will beguile " — to the 
drunken messenger who allowed the letter carried by him to be 
stolen from him — and to the treacherous Queen-mother who caused 
them to be stolen. Indeed, in addressing the last-named person- 
age, the poet seems to lose all control over himself. 

" O Domegild, I have no English digne 
Unto thy malice and thy tyranny : 
And therefore to the fiend I thee resign, 
Let him at length tell of thy treachery. 
Fye, mannish, fye ! — Oh nay, by God, I lie ; 



11 6 CHAUCER. 

Fye fiendish spirit, for I dare well tell, 
Though thou here walk, thy spirit is in hell." 

At the opening of the Legend of Ariadne he bids Minos redden 
with shame ; and towards its close, when narrating how Theseus 
sailed away, leaving his true-love behind, he expresses a hope that 
the wind may drive the traitor "a twenty devil M^ay." Nor does 
this vivacity find a less amusing expression in so trifling a touch 
as that in the Clerk's Tale., where the domestic sent to deprive 
Griseldis of her boy becomes, eo iipso as it were, " this ugly ser- 
geant." 

Closely allied to Chaucer's liveliness and gaiety of disposition, 
and in part springing from them, are his keen sense of the ridicu. 
lous and the power of satire which he has at his command. Hi^ 
humour has many varieties, ranging from the refined and half- 
melancholy irony of the Hotise of Fame to the ready wit of the 
sagacious uncle of Cressid, the burlesque fun of the inimitable 
Nwi's Priesfs Tale., and the very gross salt of the Reeve., the 
Miller.^ Tiud. one or two others. The springs of humour often 
capriciously refuse to allow themselves to be discovered ; nor 
is the satire of which the direct intention is transparent invari- 
ably the most effective species of satire. Concerning, however, 
Chaucer's use of the power which he in so large a measure pos- 
sessed, viz., that of covering with ridicule the palpable vices or 
weaknesses of the classes or kinds of men represented by some of 
his character-types, one assertion may be made with tolerable 
safety. Whatever may have been the first stimulus and the ulti- 
mate scope of the wit and humour which he here expended, they 
are Jtot to be explained as moral indignation in disguise. And in 
truth Chaucer's merriment flows spontaneously from a source very 
near the surface ; he is so extremely diverting, because he is so 
extremely diverted himself. 

Herein, too, lies the harmlessness of Chaucer's fun. Its harm- 
lessness, to wit, for those who are able to read him in something 
like the spirit in which he wrote — never a very easy achievement 
with regard to any author, and one which the beginner and the 
young had better be advised to abstain from attempting with Chau- 
cer in the overflow of his more or less unrestrained moods. At all 
events, the excuse of gaiety of heart — the plea of that vieil esfrit 
Gaulois which is so often, and very rarely without need, invoked 
in an exculpatory capacity by modern French criticism — is the 
best defence ever made for -Chaucer's laughable irregularities, 
either by his apologists or by himself. "Men should not," he 
says, and says very truly, " make earnest of game." But when he 
audaciously defends himself against the charge of impropriety by 
declaring that he must tell stories in character., and coolly requests 
any person who may find anything in one of his tales objectionable 
to turn to another : — 

" For he shall find enough, both great and small. 
Of storial thing that toucheth gentleness, 



CHA UCER. 

Likewise morality and holiness ; 

Blame ye not me, if ye should choose amiss — " 



117 



we are constrained to shake our heads at the transparent sophistry 
of the plea, which requires no exposure. For Chaucer knew very 
well how to give life and colour to his page without recklessly dis- 
regarding bounds the neglect of which was even in his day offen- 
sive to many besides the '■^precious folk" of whom he half deri- 
sively pretends to stand in awe. In one instance he defeated his 
own purpose ; for the so-called Cook's Tale of Gamelyn was sub- 
stituted by some earlier editor for the original Cook's Tale, which 
has thus in its completed form become a rarity removed beyond 
the reach of even the most ardent of curiosity hunters. Fortu- 
nately, however, Chaucer spoke the truth when he said that from 
this point of view he had written very differently at different times ; 
no whiter pages remain than many of his. 

But the realism of Chaucer is something more than exuberant 
love of fun and light-hearted gaiety. He is the first great painter 
of character, because he is the first great observer of it among 
modern European writers. His power of comic observation need 
not be dwelt upon again, after the illustrations of it which have 
been incidentally furnished in these pages. More especially with 
regard to the manners and ways of women, which often, while seem- 
ing so natural to women themselves, appear so odd to male observers, 
Chaucer's eye was ever on the alert. But his works likewise con- 
tain passages displaying a penetrating insight into the minds of 
men, as well as a keen eye for their manners, together with a power 
of generalising, which, when kept within due bounds, lies at the 
root of the wise knowledge of humankind so admirable to us in our 
great essayists, from Bacon to Addison and his modern successors. 
How truly, for instance, in Troilus and Cressid, Chaucer observes 
on the enthusiastic belief of converts, the '' strongest-faithed " of 
men, as he understands ! And how fine, is the saying as to the 
suspiciousness characteristic of lewd {i. e., ignorant) people, that 
to things which are made more subtly 

" Than they can in their lewdness comprehend," 

they gladly give the worst interpretation which suggests itself ! 
How appositely the Canon's Yeoman describes the arrogance of 
those who are too clever bv half; "when a man has an over-great 
wit," he savs, "it very often chances to him to misuse it! " And 
with how ripe a wisdom, combined with ethics of true gentleness, 
the honest Franhlin, at the opening of his Tale, discourses on the 
uses and the beauty of long suffering : — 

" For one thing, sires, safely dare I say, 
That friends the one the other must^obey, 
If they will longe holde company. 
Love will not be constraint! by mastery. 
When mastery comes, the god of love anon 



Il8 CHAUCER. 

Beateth his wings — and, farewell ! he is gone. 

Love is a thing as any spirit free. 

Women desire, by nature, liberty, 

And not to be constrained as a thrall ; 

And so do men, if I the truth say shall. 

Look, who that is most patient in love, 

He is at his advantage all above. 

A virtue high is patience, certain. 

Because it vanquisheth, as clerks explain, 

Things to which rigour never could attain. 

For every word men should not chide and plain; 

Learn ye to suffer, or else, so may I go. 

Ye shall it learn, whether ye will or no. 

For in this world certain no wight there is 

Who neither doth nor saith some time amiss. 

Sickness or ire, or constellation, 

Wine, woe, or changing of complexi&n, 

Causeth full oft to do amiss or speak. 

For every wrong men may not vengeance wreak: 

After a time there must be temperance 

With every wight that knows self governance." 

It was by virtue of his power of observing and drawing charac* 
ter, above all, that Chaucer became the true predecessor of two 
several growths in our literature, in both of which. characterisation 
forms a most important element — it might perhaps be truly said, 
the element which surpasses all others in importance. From this 
point of view the dramatic poets of the Elizabethan age remain un- 
equalled by any other school or group of dramatists, and the Eng- 
lish novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the 
representatives of any other development of prose-fiction. In the 
art of construction, in the invention and the arrangement of inci- 
dent, these dramatists and novelists may have been left behind by 
others ; in the creation of character they are, on the whole, without 
rivals in -their respective branches of literature. To the earlier at 
least of these growths Chaucer may be said to have pointed the 
way. His personages — more especially, of course, as has been 
seen, those who are assembled together in the Prologtie to the 
Canterbury Tales — are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even 
mere actual possibilities, but real human beings, and types true to 
the likeness of whole classes of men and women, or to the mould 
in which all human nature is cast. This is, upon the whole, the 
most v/onderful, as it is perhaps the most generally recognised, of 
Chaucer's gifts. It would not of itself have sufficed to make him 
a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a literary 
form into which to pour the inspirations of his genius, as it after- 
wards stood ready for our great Elizabethans. But to it were 
added in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation, and 
that power of finding the right words for it, which have determined 
the success of many plays, and the absence of which materially de- 
tracts from the completeness of the effect of others, liigh as their 
merits may be in other respects. How thrilling, for instance, is 



CHAUCER. 



119 



that rapid passage across the stage, as one might almost call it, 
of the unhappy Dorigen in the Franklin's Tale / The antece- 
dents of the situation, to be sure, are, as has been elsewhere sug- 
gested, absurd enough ; but who can fail to feel that spasm of anx- 
ious sympathy with which a powerful dramatic situation in itself 
affects us, when the wife, whom for truth's sake her husband has 
bidden be untrue to him, goes forth on her unholy errand of duty ? 
" Whither so fast ? " asks the lover : 

" And she made answer, half as she were? mad : 
' Unto the garden, as my husl^and bade, 
My promise for to keep, alas ! alas ! ' " 

Nor, as the abbreviated prose version of the Pardoner's Tale g\xQ.n 
above will suffice to show, was Chaucer deficient in the art of 
dramatically arranging a story ; while he is not excelled by any of 
our non-dramatic poets in the spirit and movement of his dialogue. 
The Book of the DiicJiess and the House of Fame, but more espe- 
cially Troilus and Cressid7xxi<\ the connecting passages between some 
of the Canterbury Tales, may be referred to in various illustration 
of this. 

The vividness of his imagination, which conjures up, so to speak, 
the very personality of his characters before him, and tl:ie contagi- 
ous force of his pathos, which is as true and as spontaneous as his 
humour, complete in him the born dramatist. We can see Constance 
as with our own eyes, in the agony of her peril : — 

" Have ye not seen some time a pallid face 
Among a press, of him that liath been led 
Towards his death, where him awaits no grace, 
And such a colour in his face hath had, 
Men mighte known his face was so bested 
'Mong all the other faces in that rout? 
So stands Constance, anc[ iooketh her about." 

And perhaps there is no better way of studying the general character 
of Chaucer's pathos than a comparison of the MonFs Tale from 
which this passage is taken, and the Clerk's Tale, with their origi- 
nals. In the former, for instance, the ]jrayer of Constance, when 
condemned through Domegild's guilt to be cast adrift once more 
on the waters, her piteous words and tenderness to her little child 
as it lies weeping in lier arms, and her touching leave-taking from 
the land of the husband wlio has condemned her — all these are 
Chaucer's own. So also are parts of one of the most affecting 
passages in the Clerk's Tale— Griseldis' farewell to her daughter. 
But it is as unnecessary to lay a finger upon lines and passages illus- 
trating Chaucer's pathos as upon odiers illustrating his humour. 

Thus, then, Chaucer was a born dramatist ; but fate willed it, 
that the branch of our literature which might probably have of all 
been the best suited to his genitis was not to spring into life till he 
and several generations after him had passed away. To be sure, 
during the fourteenth century the so-called miracle-plays flourished 



L 



I20 CHAUCER, 

abundantly in England, and were, as there is every reason to be< 
lieve, already largely performed by the trading-companies of Lon- 
don and the towns. The allusions in Chaucer to these beginnings 
of our English drama are, however, remarkably scanty. The Wife 
of Bath mentions plays of miracles among the other occasions of 
religious sensation haunted by her, clad in her gay scarlet gown- 
including vigils, processions, preachings, pilgrimages, and marriages. 
And the jolly parish-clerk of the Miller's 7'ale, we are informed, at 
times, in order to show his lightness and his skill, played " Herod 
on a scaffold high " — thus, by-the-bye, emulating the parish clerks 
of London, who are known to have been among the performers of 
miracles in the Middle Ages. The allusion to Pilate's voice in the 
Miller's Prologue, and that in the Tale to 

" The sorrow of Noah with his fellowship 
That he had ere he got his wife to ship," 

seem likewise dramatic reminiscences ; and the occurrence of these 
three allusions in a single Tale and its Prologue would incline one 
to think that Chaucer had recently amused himself at one of these 
performances. But plays are not mentioned among the entertain- 
ments enumerated at the opening of the Pardoner^ s Tale; and it 
would in any case have been unlikely that Chaucer should have 
paid much attention to diversions which were long chiefly " visited " 
by the classes with which he could have no personal connection, 
and even at a much later date were dissociated in men's minds from 
poetry and literature. Had he ever written anything remotely par- 
taking of the nature of a dramatic piece, it could at the most have 
been the words of the songs in some congratulatory royal pageant 
such as Lydgate probably wrote on the return of Henry V. after 
Agincourt ; though there is not the least reason for supposing Chau- 
cer to have taken so much interest in the " ridings" through the 
City which occupied many a morning of the idle apprentice of the 
Cook's Tale, Perkyn Revellour. It is, perhaps, more surprising 
to find Chaucer, who was a reader of several Latin poets, and who 
had heard of more, both Latin and Greek, show no knowledge what- 
ever of the ancient classical drama, with which he may accordingly 
be fairly concluded to have been wholly unacquainted. 

To one further aspect of Chaucer's realism as a poet reference 
has already been made ; but a final mention of it may most appro- 
priately conclude this sketch of his poetical characteristics. His 
descriptions of nature are as true as his sketches of human char- 
acter ; and incidental touches in him reveal his love of the one as 
unmistakeably as his unflagging interest in the study of the other. 
Even these May-morning exordia, in which he was but following a 
fashion — faithfully observed both by the French trouveres and by 
the English romances translated from their productions, and not 
forgotten by the author of the earlier part of the Rojnan de la Rose 
— always come from his hands with the freshness of natural truth. 
They cannot be called original in conception, and it would be diffi- 



CHAUCER. 121 

cult to point out in them anything strikingly original in execution ; 
yet they cannot be included among those matter-of-course notices 
of morning and evening, sunrise and sunset, to wliich so many 
poets have accustomed us since (be it said with reverence) Homer 
himself. In Chaucer these passages make his page " as fresh as 
is the month of May." When he went forth on these April and 
May mornings, it was not solely with the intent of composing as 
roundelay or a tnarguerite ; but we may be well assured he allowed 
the song of the little birds, the perfume of the flowers,- and the 
fresh verdure of the English landscape, to sink into his very soul. 
For nowhere does he seem, and nowhere could he have been, more 
open to the influence which he received into himself, and which in 
his turn he exercised, and exercises upon others, than when he was 
in fresh contact with nature. In this influence lies the secret of 
his genius ; in his poetry there is life. 



L 



CHAUCER. 



/ 



CHAPTER IV. 

EPILOGUE. 

The legacy which Chaucer left to our literature was to fructify 
in the hands of a long succession of heirs ; and it may be said, 
with little fear of contradiction, that at no time has his fame been 
fresher and his influence upon our poets — and upon our painters as 
well as our poets — more perceptible than at the present day. 
When Gower first put forth his Confessio Ama?itis, we may as- 
sume that Chaucer's poetical labours, of the fame of which his 
brother-poet declared the land to be full, had not yet been crowned 
by his last and greatest work. As a poet, therefore, Gower in one 
sense owes less to Chaucer than did many of their successors ; 
though, on the other hand, it may be said with truth that to Chaucer 
is due the fact that Gower (whose earlier productions were in 
French and in Latin) ever became a poet at all. The Confessia 
Aviajiiis is no book for all times like the Canterbury Tales ; but 
the conjoined names of Chaucer and Gower added strength to one 
another in the eyes of the generations ensuing, little anxious as 
these generations were to distinguish which of the pair was really 
the first to " garnish our English rude " with the flowers of a new 
poetic diction and art of verse. 

The Lancaster period of our history had its days of national 
glory as well as of national humiliation, and indisputably, as a 
whole, advanced the growth of the nation towards political man- 
hood. But it brought with it no golden summer to fulfil the 
promises of the spring-tide of our modern poetical literature. The 
two poets whose names stand forth from the barren after-season of 
the earlier half of the fifteenth century, were, both of them, ac- 
cording to their own profession, disciples of Chaucer. In truth, 
however, Occleve, the only nameworthy poetical writer of the reign 
of Henry IV., seems to have been less akin as an author to Chaucer 
than to Gower, while his principal poem manifestly was, in an even 
greater degree than the Confessio Amantis, a severely learned or, 
as its author terms it, unbuxom book. Lydgate, on the other hand, 
the famous monk of Bury, has in him something of the spirit as 
well as of the manner of Chaucer, under whose advice he is said to 
have composed one of his principal poems. Though a monk, he 
was no stay-at-home or do-nothing; like him of the Canterbury 



CHAUCER. 123 

Tales^ we may suppose Lydgate to have scorned the maxim that a 
monk out of his cloister is like a fish out of water; and doubtless 
many days which he could spare from the instruction of youth at 
St. Edmund's Bury were spent about the London streets, of the 
sights and sounds of which he has left us so vivacious a record — 
a kind of farcical supplement to the Prologue of the Canterbury 
Tales. His literary career, part of which certainly belongs to the 
reign of Henry V., has some resemblance to Chaucer's, though it 
is less regular and less consistent with itself; and several of his 
poems bear more or less distinct traces of Chaucer's influence. 
The Troy-book is not founded on Troilus and Cressid, though it is 
derived from the sources which had fed the original of Chaucer's 
poem; but the 'Temple of Glass seems io have been an imitation 
of the House of Fame j and the Stojy of Thebes is actually intro- 
duced by its author as an additional Ca/iterbury Tale, and chal- 
lenges comparison with the rest of the series into which it asks ad- 
mittance. Both Occleve and Lydgate enjoyed the patronage of a 
prince of genius descended from the House, with whose founder 
Chaucer was so closely connected — Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. 
Meanwhile, the sovereign of a neighbouring kingdom was in all 
probability himself the agent who established the influence of 
Chaucer as predominant in the literature of his native land. The 
long though honourable captivity in England of King James I. of 
Scotland — the best poet among kings and the best king among 
poets, as he has been antithetically "called — was consoled by the 
study of the " hymns " of his "dear masters, Chaucer and Gower," 
for the happiness of whose souls he prays at the close of his poem, 
The King''s Quair. That most charming of love-allegories, in 
which the Scottish king sings the story of his captivity and of his 
deliverance by the sweet messenger of love, not only closely imi- 
tates Chaucer in detail, more especially at its opening, but is per- 
vaded by his spirit. Many subsequent Scottish poets imitated 
Chaucer, and some of them loyally acknowledged their debts to 
him. Gawin Douglas in his Palace of Honour, and Henryson in 
his Testament of Cressid 2iwdi elsewhere, are followers of the South- 
ern master. The wise and brave Sir David Lyndsay was familiar 
with his writings ; and he was not only occasionally imitated, but 
praised with enthusiastic eloquence by William Dunbar, "that 
darling of the Scottish Muses," whose poetical merits Sir Walter 
Scott, from some points of view, can hardly be said to have exag- 
gerated, when declaring him to have been "justly raised to a level 
with Chaucer by every judge of poetry, to whom his obsolete 
language has not rendered him unintelligible." Dunbar knew that 
this Scottish language was but a form of that which, as he de- 
clared, Chaucer had made to " surmount every terrestrial tongue, 
as far as midnight is surmounted by a May morning." 

Meanwhile, in England, the influence of Chaucer continued to 
live even during the dreary interval which separates from one 
another two important epochs of our literary history. Now, as in the 
days of the Norman kings, ballads orally transmitted were the peo- 



124 CHAUCER, 

pie's poetry ; and one of these popular ballads carried the story of 
Patient Gi-issel into regions where Chaucer's name was probably 
unknown. When, after the close of the troubled season of the 
Roses, our poetic literature showed the first signs of a revival, they 
consisted in a return to the old masters of the'fourteenth- century. 
The poetry of Hawes, the learned author of the crabbed Pastime 
of Pleasure, exhibits an undeniable continuity with that of Chaucer. 
Gower, and Lydgate, to which triad he devotes a chapter of pane- 
gyric. Hawes, however, presses into the service of his allegory 
not only all the Virtues and all the Vices, whom from habit we can 
tolerate in such productions, but also Astronomy, Geometry, Arith- 
metic, and the rest of the seven Daughters of Doctrine, whom we 
cannot, and is altogether inferior to the least of his models. It is, 
at the same time, to his credit that he seems painfully aware of his 
inability to cope with either Chaucer or Lydgate as to vigour of in- 
vention. There is, in truth, more of the dramatic spirit of Chaucer 
in Barklay's Ship of Fools, which, though essentially a translation, 
achieved in England the popularity of an original work ; for this 
poem, like the Canterbury Tales, introduces into its admirable 
framework a variety of lifelike sketches of character and manners 
— it has in it that dramatic element which is so Chaucerian a char- 
acteristic. But the aim of its author was didactic, which Chaucer's 
had never been. 

When with the poems of Surrey and Wyatt, and with the first 
attempts in the direction of the regular drama, the opening of the 
second great age in our literature approached, and when, about 
half a century afterwards, that age actually opened with an un- 
equalled burst of varied productivity, it would seem as if Chaucer's 
influence might naturally enough have passed away, or at least 
become obscured. Such was not, however the case, and Chaucer 
survived into the age of the English Renascence as an established 
English classic, in which capacity Caxton had honoured him by 
twice issuing an edition of his works from the Westminster print- 
ing-press. Henry VIII. 's favourite — the reckless but pithy satir- 
ist, Skelton — was alive to the merits of his great predecessor ; and 
Skelton's patron, William Thynne, a royal official, busied himself 
with editing Chaucer's works. The loyal servant of Queen Mary, 
the wise and witty John Heywood, from whose Piterludes the step 
is so short to the first regular English comedy, in one of these 
pieces freely plagiarised a passage in the Canterbury Tales. 
Tottel, the printer of the favourite poetic Miscellany published 
shortly before Queen Elizabeth's accession, included in his collec- 
tion the beautiful lines, cited above, called Good Coimsel of 
Chaucer. And when at last the EHzabethan era properly so-called 
began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of hold- 
ing fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary 
growth what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated 
to himself — not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrow- 
ing or taking over — much that he had found in the French trou- 
v^res, and in Italian poetry and prose. The first work which ca« 



CHAUCER. 



125 



be included in the great period of Elizabethan literature is the 
Shepherd^s Calendar, where Spenser is still in a partly imitative 
stage ; and it is Chaucer whom he imitates and extols in his poem, 
and whom his alter ego, the mysterious "£", A'.," extols in preface 
and notes. The longest of the passages in which reference is 
made by Spenser to Chaucer, under the pseudonym of Tityrus, is 
more especially noteworthy, both as showing the veneration of the 
younger for the older poet, and as testifying to the growing pop- 
ularity of Chaucer at the time when Spenser wrote. 

The same great poet's debt to his revered predecessor in the 
Daphnaida has been already mentioned. The Fairy Queen is the 
masterpiece of an original mind, and its supreme poetic quality is 
a lofty magnificence upon the whole foreign to Chaucer's genius ; 
but Spenser owed something more than his archaic forms to 
" Tityrus," with whose style he had erst disclaimed all ambition to 
match his pastoral pipe. In a well-known passage of his great 
epos he declares that it is through sweet infusion of the older 
poet's own spirit that he, the younger, follows the footing of his 
feet, in order so the rather to meet with his meaning. It was this, 
the romantic spirit proper, which Spenser sought to catch from 
Chaucer, but which, like all those who consciously seek after it, he 
transmuted into a new quality and a new power. With Spenser 
the change was into something mightier and loftier. He would, 
we cannot doubt, readily have echoed the judgment of his friend 
and brother-poet concerning Chaucer. " I know not," writes Sir 
Philip Sidney, " whether to marvel more, either that he in that 
misty time could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, walk 
so stumblingly after him. Yet had he," adds Sidney, with the 
generosity of a true critic, who is not lost in wonder at his own 
cleverness in discovering defects, "great wants, fit to be forgiven 
in so reverent an antiquity." And yet a third Elizabethan, Michael 
Drayton, pure of tone and high of purpose, joins his voice to those 
of Spenser and Sidney, hailing in the " noble Chaucer " 

'* . . .The first of those that ever break, 
Into the Muses' treasure and first spake 
In weighty numbers," 

and placing Gower, with a degree of judgment not reached by his 
and Chaucer's immediate successors, in his proper relation of 
poetic rank to his younger but greater contemporary. 

To these names should be added that of George Puttenham — if 
he was indeed the author of the grave and elaborate treatise, dedi- 
cated to Lord Burghley, on The Art of English Poesy. In this 
work mention is repeatedly made of Chaucer, " father of our 
English poets ;" and his learning, and "the natural of his pleasant 
wit," are alike judiciously commended. One of Puttenham's best 
qualities as a critic is that he never speaks without his book; and 
he comes very near to discovering Chaucer's greatest gift when 
noticing his excellence in prosopographia — a term which to Chaucer 



126 CHAUCER. 

would, perhaps, have seemed to require translation. At the 
obsoleteness of Chaucer's own diction this critic, who writes 
entirely " for the better brought-up sort," is obliged to shake his 
learned head. 

Enough has been said in the preceding pages to support the 
opinion that among the wants which fell to the lot of Chaucer as a 
poet, perhaps the greatest (though Sidney would never have al- 
lowed this) was the want of poetic form most in harmony with his 
most characteristic gifts. The influence of Chaucer upon the 
dramatist of the Elizabethan age was probably rather indirect and 
general than direct and personal ; but indications or illustrations 
of it may be traced in a considerable number of these writers, 
including, perhaps, among the earhest Richard Edwards as the 
author of a non-extant tr2igtdy, Pala77ton and Arcite, ^.nd among 
the latest the author — or authors — of The two Noble Kms7nen. 
Besides Fletcher and Shakspeare, Greene, Nash, and Middleton, 
and more especially Jonson (as both poet and grammarian), were 
acquainted with Chaucer's writings ; so that it is perhaps rather a 
proof of the widespread popularity of the Canterbury Tales than 
the reverse that they were not largely resorted to for materials by 
the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Under Charles I. 
Troilus and Cressid found a translator in Sir Francis Kynaston, 
whom Cartwright congratulated on having made it possible " that 
we read Chaucer now without a dictionary." A personage, how- 
ever, in Cartwright's best known play, the Antiquary Moth, prefers 
to talk on his own account " genuine " Chaucerian English. 

To pursue the further traces of the influence of Chaucer 
through such a literary aftergrowth as the younger Fletchers, into 
the early poems of Milton, would be beyond the purpose of the 
present essay. In the treasure-house of that great poet's mind 
were gathered memories and associations innumerable, though the 
subhmest flights of his genius soared aloft into regions whither the 
imagination of none of our earliest poets had preceded them. On 
the other hand, the days have passed for attention to be spared for 
the treatment experienced by Chaucer in the Augustan age, to 
which he was a barbarian only to be tolerated if put into the court- 
dress of the final period of civiHsation. Still, even thus, he was 
not left altogether unread ; nor was he in all cases adapted without 
a certain measure of success. The irrepressible vigour, and the 
frequent felicity, of Dryden's Fables contrast advantageously with 
the tame evenness of the Temple of Fa7;'ie, an early effort by 
Pope, who had wit enough to imitate in a juvenile parody some of 
the grossest peculiarities of Chaucer's manner, but who would 
have been quite ashamed to reproduce him in a serious literary 
performance, without the inevitable polish and cadence of his own 
style of verse. Later modernisations — even of those which a band 
of poets in some instances singularly qualified for the task put 
forth in a collection pubhshed in the year i8z.it, and which, on the 
part of some of them at least, was the result of conscientious en- 
deavour — it is needless to characterise here. Slight incidental use 



CHAUCER. 127 

has been made of some of these in this essay, the author of which 
would gladly have abstained from printing a single modernised 
phrase or word — most of all, any which he has himself been guilty 
of re-casting. The time cannot be far distant when even the least 
unsuccessful of such attempts will no longer be accepted, because 
no such attempts whatever will be any longer required. No 
Englishman or Englishwoman need go through "a very long or very 
laborious apprenticeship in order to" become able to read, under- 
stand, and enjoy what Chaucer himself wrote. But if this ap- 
prenticeship be too hard, then some sort of makeshift must be 
accepted, or antiquity must remain the " canker-worm" even of a 
great national poet, as Spenser said it had already in his day 
proved to be of Chaucer. 

Meanwhile, since our poetic literature has long thrown off the 
shackles which forced it to adhere to one particular group of 
models, he is not a true English poet who should remain unin- 
fluenced by any of the really great among his predecessors. Jf 
Chaucer has again, in a special sense, become the " master dear 
and father reverent " of some of our living poets, in a wider sense 
he must hold this relation to them all and to all their successors, 
RO long as he continues to be known and understood. As it is, 
there are few worthies of our literature whose names seem to 
awaken throughout the English-speaking world a readier sentiment 
of familiar regard ; and in New England, where the earliest great 
poet of Old England is cherished not less warmly than among our- 
selves, a kindly cunning has thus limned his likeness : — 

" An old man in a lodge within a park ; 
The chamber walls depicted all around 
With portraiture of huntsman, hawk and hound, 
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, 
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark 
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound ; 
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, 
Then writeth in a book like any clerk. 
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote 
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age 
Made beautiful with song ; and as I read 
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note 
Of lark and linnet, and from every page 
Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead." 



GLOSSARY. 



Bencite — benedicite. 

Clepe, call. 

Deem, judge. 

Desfiiious, angry to excess. 

Digne, fit ; — disdainful. 

Frere, friar. 

Gentle, well-born. 

KeeJ), care. 

Languor, grief. 

Meinie, following, household. 

Meet, mate (?), measure (?). 

Overthwart, across. 

Parage, rank, degree. 

Press, crowd. 



Rede, advise, counsel. 
Reeve, steward, bailiff. 
Ruth, pity. 
Scall, scaS. 
Shapely, fit. 
Sithe, time. 

Spiced, nice, scrupulous. 
Targe, target, shield. 
Y prefix of past participle as in 
y-bee = bee[n). 
While, time; to quite his while^ to 

reward his pains. 
Wieldy, active. 
Wone, custom, habit. 



*** A dotted e should always be sounded in reading. 



THE END. 



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231. Nicholas Nickleby,P't 1. 20 
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Adventures of Philip, Pt 1 1. 15 
236. Knickerbocker History 
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Erling the Bold 20 

Kenelm Chillingly 20 

Deep Down 20 

Samuel Brohl & Co 20 

Gautran 20 

Bleak House, Part I 20 

Bleak House, Part II... 20 
What Will He Do With , 

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De vereux 20 

Life of Webster, Part 1. 15 
Life of Webster, Pt. II. 15 

The Crayon Papers 20 

The Caxtons, Part I 15 

The Caxtons, Part 1 1... 15 
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Critical Reviews, etc 10 

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Peter the Whaler 20 

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Last of the Barons,Pt.II.i5 

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, File No. 113 20 

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The Parisians, Part II.. 20 
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A Christmas Carol, etc. . 15 

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Dora Thorne 20 

Maid of Athens. 20 

Conquest of Spain.. 10 

Fitzboodle Papers, etc. 10 

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Rossmoyne 20 

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Novels by Eminent Handsio 
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No Thoroughfare 10 

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Captain Bonneville .... 20 

Golden Girls 20 

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Winifred Power 20 

Great HoggartyDiamond 10 

Pausanias 15 

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A Real Queen 20 

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The Wizard's Son 25 

Harry Lorrequer 20 

How It All Came Round.20 
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The Canon's Ward 20 

Lucile, by O. Meredith. 20 
Every Day Cook Book.. 20 
Lays of Ancient Rome . . 20 

Life of Bums 20 

The Young Foresters. ..20 
John Bull andHis Island 20 
Salt Water, by Kingston. 20 
The Midshipman ....... 20 

Pioctor's Poems 20 

Clayton's Rangers 20 

Schiller's Poems -20 

Goethe's Faust 20 

Goethe's Poems 20 

Life of Thackeray lo 

Dante's Vision of Hell, 
Purgatory and Paradise. .20 

An Interesting Case 20 

Life of Byron, Nichol. . . 10 

Life of Bunyan 10 

Valerie's Fate 10 

Grandfather Lickshingle. 20 
Lays of the Scottish Ca- 
valiers 20 

Willis' Poems 20 

Tales of the French Re- 
volution 15 

Loom and Lugger . . 20 

More Leaves from a Life 
in the Highlands. ..... 15 

Hygiene of the Brain. ..25 

Berkeley the Banker 20 

Homes Abroad 15 

Scott's Lady of the Lake, 

with notes 2c 

Modern Christianity a ' 
civilized Heathenism.. . . 15 



THE CELEBRATED 




='=':^S=i=n=i=ra= 



SOHMEB 




Grand, Square and Upright 




PIANOFORTES. 

The demands now made b^ ^n educated musical public are so exacting that very few 
Pianoforte Manufacturers can produce Instruments that will stand the test which merit 
requires. SOHMER & CO., as Manufacturers, rank amongst these chosen few, who are 
acknowledged to be makers of standard instruments. In these days, when Manufacturers 
urge the low price of their wares rather than their superior quality as an inducement to 
purchase, it may not be amiss to f=i;;;gti8t that, in a Piano, quality and price are too in- 
sep irably joined to expect the one without the other. 

Every Piano ought to be judged as to the quality of its tone, its touch, and its work- 
manship; if any one of these is wanting in excellence, however good the others may be, 
the instrument will be imperfect. It is the combination of these qualities in the highest 
degree that constitutes the perfect Piano, and it is this combination that has given the 
*' SOIIMER " its honorable position wi*,h the trade and the public. 

Received First Prize Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876. 
Received First Prize at Exhibition, Montreal, Canada, 1881 & 1882- 

SOHMER & CO., Manufacturers, 

149-155 E. 14th St., New York. 



